


made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

by Dialux



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Lily Evans Potter, F/M, Gen, James Potter Lives, Lily Evans Potter Lives, M/M, Prompt Fic, or near enough that i'll ever write
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-05-30 02:10:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 41,596
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15086759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dialux/pseuds/Dialux
Summary: In one world, James Potter is wandless when he faces Voldemort.In another, he’s not.[Apocalypse AU, where both Potters survive.]





	1. in the dark times

**Author's Note:**

> I saw [this post](http://blvnk-art.tumblr.com/post/174821740109/a-fanfic-where-james-lily-and-baby-harry-escaped) on tumblr, and it overtook my brain, so... I've regressed to 2013 again. Enjoy?

In one world, James Potter is wandless when he faces Voldemort.

In another, he’s not.

...

“Lily, take Harry and go! It’s him! Go! Run! I’ll hold him off-”

The door blasts inwards and Lily runs. She hears, distantly, over the heartbeat loud in her ears- roaring, hissing, crashes. James has always been best at transfiguration. Their ground floor will be a battlefield: transfigured animals and stone and stuffing littering the entire floor. 

 _Maybe Petunia’s godawful vase will finally do some good,_ she thinks spitefully, slamming the nursery door shut behind her.

(Lily, everyone knows, is good at potions, better at charms.

What very few people know is what she’s best at: warding.)

The spells light up the door, wreathing it red and silver. It will hold, even against Voldemort, but not nearly long enough. Reinforcements won’t arrive for them. Nobody even knows where they are; which of James’ many properties they’ve chosen. With the recent losses in the Order, they’ve adopted a policy of letting the Auror Department be the first responders, at least until their ranks are thickened a little.

But none of that will help Lily save Harry. None of that will help her save James.

She holds Harry close, then deposits him behind her, into the crib. 

Warding is not a skill that muggleborns are supposed to be good at. It’s built off of family books, bound in blood, and Lily’s just isn’t red enough. But Lily has brains and a wand and a tongue sharp as a razor- she’s  _good_ at warding, has an instinctive understanding of when she’s misstepped, and an even better nose for finding solutions that the original warders couldn’t understand even if they tried.

 _How do you beat death?_ She’s searched for the answer for nearly a year. 

Now she knows. 

Soon, Voldemort will enter. He’ll be angry; being denied anything makes him angry, and these wards will be strong enough to sting him into rage.

Lily cocks her head, listening. There’s a far cry of pain, and she shudders, hands trembling. James is  _hurting._ She wants to go to him. She wants to magic them away, the three of them hiding somewhere else, somewhere safe and sound- but it looks like this is the end. Anti-apparition wards are hot over her shoulders, like fur coats on a muggy summer day. The floo is down. Brooms are hidden in the cupboard under the kitchen sink, because Harry’s managed to sneak his toy out from everywhere else.

The wood on the stairs creak.

She knows, then, that James is dead. Lily chokes on her grief and tightens her grip on her wand. Three times they’ve defied Voldemort, and thrice have they survived. 

_The end._

The door starts to glow. Lily throws some more wards up, but they’re faltering things, frail and easily batted aside. The wood bends and curves before shattering into a thousand splinters.

Lily conjures a wind that makes her lungs ache, rage and hatred hot in her limbs, and sends the splinters straight back into Voldemort’s face.

He roars, wand slashing upwards. He deflects most of them, but a few get in before he can- Lily can see the pink scars, scraping blood down one temple.

“Lily Potter,” says Voldemort, eyes glittering. “Step aside.”

“No,” Lily replies, voice overloud, shaking. She’s so fucking afraid. “Stop. Please-”

He smiles, slow and white, like a snake baring its fangs. “I’m not here for you.”

“You’re here for my son.” Lily lifts her wand higher and plants her feet in a stance that allows her to protect Harry and still keep her balance. “I’m not going to let you kill him.”

“You cannot stop me.”

She swallows.

“I can try,” says Lily Potter, before she starts dueling Voldemort.

...

Downstairs, James Potter lies in a pool of his own blood.

His glasses have gone missing. There’s a wooden leg stuck through his right thigh- the entire dinner table, lifted and dropped straight down onto him- and his wand lies just out of his grip, where it rolled away from nerveless fingers. He’s close to death; James can taste it in the air, the cold that his father described on his deathbed as peppermint leaves off Orkney’s coast. But James isn’t dead yet.

His wife and son aren’t dead either.

James can’t quite breathe, not after Voldemort slammed him into the wall three times in a row. His ribs are probably broken. His wrist is  _definitely_ broken. But James is alive.

Harry is alive. Lily is alive.

He stretches, blood slicking his fingers, a scream caught in his throat, and reaches for his wand.

...

She’s never fought like this before. 

Harry is sobbing behind her. Voldemort is still alive, and strong, and Lily is quickly tiring. 

Then there’s a sound from downstairs.

Voldemort’s scarlet eyes narrow. “So your husband isn’t dead yet.”

Hope, golden and terrible, unfurls down her spine. Lily reaches behind her and grips Harry’s tiny fist in her own. 

“Little matter,” hisses Voldemort. “I’ll kill him after your son. I offered you peace, Lily Potter, do not forget that. But I’m tiring of this defiance.”

_Tiring?_

Lily laughs. “He’s alive,” she says, as if it’s an explanation. 

(It is.)

...

 _“Bombarda,”_ whispers James. 

...

The world teeters. Lily grabs Harry and whirls on the spot, not even waiting for the Anti-apparition wards to fall. Voldemort screams, high and piercing, and Lily changes her mind even as she turns. She knows the anti-apparition wards will fall, trusts that James hasn’t failed- but she does one thing she knows he’ll never forgive her for.

Lily doesn’t apparate away.

She apparates downstairs.

Straight to James’ side. He’s bloodsoaked, unconscious, and their home is falling apart around them. Half the ceiling caves inwards, not a foot from James’ face, and Lily shrieks, echoing Harry’s fear. Then she gets herself under control.

She apparates James- all of James, along with the table his right leg is speared under- away with her, straight to a forest she’d gone camping in, once, years and years ago, before her parents died. Harry’s screaming in one of her ears, red-faced and terrified.

 _Me too, bud,_ Lily thinks, as they land on the mossy forest growth. She bends over, bile sour in her throat.  _I’ve never been so scared, Harry._

Then she turns to James, and her heart stutters in her chest. 

“Oh, Jimmy,” whispers Lily. His shirt is saturated with his blood, and congealed to his skin. Lily’s got some basic mediwitch training, along with the rest of the Order- Albus had insisted, and so had Madam Pomfrey- but she’s not sure how much help it’ll be with someone this pale, someone who’s lost this much blood. “What have you done to yourself?”

She puts a gentle leashing spell on Harry- it keeps him from wandering further than three meters from her, and the forest is novel enough to keep him occupied while she tends to James. But Lily doesn’t have any potions, no medicines, nothing at all save for her wand, and her hands are shaking enough that it probably make matters worse.

Her husband is bleeding out in front of her, and Lily can’t do anything about it.

 _You’re a witch, aren’t you?_ Petunia’s voice asks behind her, sharp and disdainful.  _Be a witch. Do witchy things._

 _You just dueled Voldemort,_ Remus points out, in his gentle, incisive fashion.  _You’ve got a wand that dueled him and survived four times. You’ve got a mind that did the same._

 _Lils,_ says Sirius, exasperated, teasing, warm,  _you’re not just good at warding things._

_You’re good at creating wards._

Creating wards out of scratch. Blooming golden, impenetrable shields out of words and magic. Are wards so different from spells?

 _“Episkey,”_ says Lily, and James’ wrist rights itself with a snap. 

There are times in Lily’s life when she’s survived things nobody else could have. She’s never been able to explain it; but the world disappears, and so does Lily’s fear, and all that’s left of her is something cold and intent on the task in front of her. 

It’s like that now.

Everything- the forest, the sting of a shallow cut across her left arm, even Harry- disappears, replaced by someone who doesn’t flinch at her husband’s pain, who doesn’t hesitate at the stink of burned flesh, who pulls together medical texts from two-three-four-ten-years’ light reading previous, fighting to keep James alive against all odds.

It’s past dawn when Lily breaks out of the state. James isn’t exactly stable, but he’s breathing, and she’s certain that his ribs haven’t punctured his lungs. She’s vanished the table and cauterized the wound on his thigh. To fix it up further, she’ll need a proper medical textbook.

To get him stable, she’ll need blood-replenishing potions.

She swallows, now, stumbling back to sit against a tree. Her legs are starting to shake, more from exhaustion than from fear. If Lily isn’t careful she’ll go into shock herself, and she can’t afford that. 

 _Harry._ She turns and looks for him, and finds him asleep on his belly, curled against a bush. Lily slumps back.  _I need-_

_I need potions. And food._

She slowly, slowly, rises to her feet. It’s early enough in the morning that stores wouldn’t be open; Lily can break into one of them and steal some food. She’ll need to keep them safe- James can’t be moved, not until she’s got an idea of how to get his leg fixed up, not until he gets some more blood in him. Lily waves her wand at the large, broad leaves near her and strips off the bloody shirt she’s wearing, swapping it for the still-fibrous, shapeless garment she transfigured.

 _Seven out of ten, Miss Evans,_ Lily imagines, in McGonagall’s strict, slightly disappointed voice.  _I expected better of you._

“So did I, Professor,” she mumbles under her breath, shimmying out of her pyjamas and into a weirdly lopsided skirt. It’s fine. The new fashion’s bright colors. Lily thinks about her mother, wearing wide skirts and one-inch heels until the day she died, and has to swallow inappropriate giggles.

“Sleep well, Harry,” she whispers to him, and then to James, she presses a cold hand to his cold hand. “See you soon.”

...

Sirius’ wand lights up the street, wreathing it in shining green and gold.

“No,” he whispers, staring at the wreckage. There’s no smoke. Just empty places, where four walls and a roof had once been; where, now, there’s just a pile of bricks and wood and stuffing. 

“James,” says Sirius, shaking.  _“James._ Oh, god-”

He wades into the mess, ducking under the collapsed ceilings and shoving his way through the splintered barriers- and then Sirius stops.

He stops thinking.

He stops breathing.

There, under his boots: a dark liquid. Sirius knows what it is, even before he touches it. Blood.

A low, ragged sound is torn out of his chest. Sirius lights up his wand and stares, horrified, at the sheer amount of it. It’s sunk into the wooden floorboards. He turns in a slow circle, and Sirius wants to be sick as he sees the destruction, the things that had, not one day ago, been windows or stuffed animals or tables too big for the houses they were being forced into.

There’s a small figurine under his boot, glassy and reflective.

Sirius smashes it under his foot.

...

They come for him, the Aurors, hours too late.

Sirius goes quietly.

...

An hour later, she’s got fruit and bread, scavenged from a nearby grocery store. Lily shivers as she eats it cold- the morning is freezing, biting into her thin clothing, frightening her when she considers how fragile James’ health is- so she layers warming charms on him, and then wards around them, both physical and magical.

Her hands shake as she feeds Harry. 

It hurts to leave them behind once more, but Lily cannot keep James alive without potions. And Harry would only make things more complicated.

 _Sirius,_ she thinks, even as she wards her clothes against detection.  _I could-_

But they need to survive first, and Sirius doesn’t have potions. St. Mungo’s will be closely watched. There’s only one other place that Lily can think of which will have the sheer amount of healing potions she needs.

Hogwarts.

Harry can’t leave the circle Lily’s circumscribed around him. James is in a coma, angled to catch the sun in a few hours, as soon as it’s higher than the trees. Lily’s skin looks grey and sallow, and she’s hungry, still, likely from all the magic she’s expended. She still hasn’t slept.

She draws her wand and turns around, and apparates straight into Hogsmeade.

A few charms to change the color of her hair, her height, and her voice later- Lily sneaks into Honeydukes and into their back room. She’s got hair the color of dishwater, eyes that look more blue than green, and is short enough to make people just skim their eyes over her. Adults don’t notice children, not in a school. 

It takes more effort than it should to transfigure a Hogwarts cloak, but Lily manages; there’s a yellow fringe from the leaf she transfigured it out of, but being mistaken for a Hufflepuff will only keep her profile low.

 _Albus would help,_ a voice whispers inside her head, and Lily’s seized by a terrible desire to do that- to throw herself at him and beg him to save her, save her family.  _He’s done it before. To know you’re alive..._

Peter’s betrayed them, though. Peter went and told Voldemort, and now James is in a coma, and Harry’s spelled asleep because Lily can’t risk him being awake. If the person they trusted most could betray them- Lily won’t trust anyone else. Not until James is awake, not until she can speak to him. 

Voldemort came for Harry. 

He won’t be able to find them if nobody knows where they are.

That decided, Lily ducks into the secret passage and starts walking. James had showed it to her ages ago, back when he’d wanted to indulge her sweet tooth- Lily tries to forget that memory now. 

It hurts in her like an abscess. It’s so difficult sometimes, to remember how young and foolish they’d been; how important it had seemed to be taken seriously by the adults, how proud Lily had been to stand in the same room as men like Caradoc Dearborn and Benjy Fenwick, women like Dorcas Meadowes. 

Now, Lily’s got blood under her nails and spellfire searing her tongue. 

She’s dueled Voldemort four times. She’s survived all of them.

Lily’s outlived her heroes.

...

Poppy lifts an eyebrow at the scrawny Hufflepuff who enters the Hospital wing.

“Need something?”

The girl pushes hair behind one ear and shuffles her feet. “My- my friend,” she says haltingly, “-he’s hurt. We were just throwing sparks, Madam Pomfrey!” She looks back at Poppy, eyes wide and shining. “Professor Flitwick’s  _just_ got us lifting feathers. I swear I didn’t-”

Poppy moves to her stores, waving her wand to disable the wards, even as the girl continues spewing out a long, winding story. She doesn’t remember the girl- she’s a tall one for a first year, but it does take time for even Poppy to remember names. And the girl seems excitable; the boy’s likely not even properly hurt. A little scrape, or even a sprained wrist from falling off-

 _“Stupefy,”_ Poppy hears from behind her, just as she enters her storeroom, and then she knows nothing more.

...

Lily regrets not catching Pomfrey, but there’s no time for anything more than an apologetic look at her prone form on the floor.

She takes one of the Pepper-ups and throws the glass against the ground, hard as she can manage. The glass doesn’t break- so it’s spelled unbreakable; Lily sweeps three shelves’ worth of potions into her bag, grunting as the bag becomes almost too heavy to carry.

In Godric’s Hollow, Lily’d had a bag that could have fit an entire shop’s supplies without feeling an ounce heavier.

What she has now is a bag magicked out of leaves, transfigured out of branches to give it a sturdy feel. It’s already stretched to the brim; glass shines out of its depths.

Then she sees, neatly stacked on another shelf in the corner of the storeroom: Pomfrey’s medical texts.

Featherlight charms take power, and Lily’s already nearly scraping the bottom of her magical reserves. She needs rest, needs food, needs-

_I need James alive._

And for that, Lily needs medical books.

 _“Pondere,”_ says Lily, and staggers as her world goes grey for a long, breathless moment. “Oh- fuck-”

She comes back to herself on her knees, bile and blood in her mouth. Slowly, Lily levers herself upright. Her bones pop. She hisses out through her teeth, then reaches for a Pepper-up on a nearby shelf. It’s dangerous- Pepper-up makes the drinker feel more energetic, but that doesn’t mean they are. Lily’s written essays on witches and wizards burning their magic out from too much Pepper-up.

_My entire life is dangerous now._

She tosses it back in two quaffs. 

Steam erupts out of her ears, and her world goes as sharp and bright as it had gone grey a moment before. Then, with a defiant wave of her wand, she shrinks the texts and shoves them into her pocket. 

Pomfrey is still crumpled on the ground. She’ll wake soon. Lily hefts the bag over her shoulder and drags Pomfrey inside the storeroom- she stashes her wand outside, and physically locks the door.

It’ll delay her from notifying Albus, hopefully long enough for Lily to leave Hogwarts.

The bag bulges under her hands; Lily keeps a tight grip on her wand. She can feel her charms wavering. The stick-straight hair she’s charmed is curling back into her natural waves, heavier and longer. Her shoes are pinching, because charms on inanimate objects- like her shoes- always hold for longer than charms on living things- like her feet. There’s no excuse for Lily to wear a hat, but she wishes for one, desperately, even as she trips and skids her way to the third floor corridor. She just needs to be out from under the castle, and she’ll be able to escape-

The one-eyed witch’s hump closes over her head, throwing her into sudden darkness, and Lily breathes out for the first time in too long.

Then she runs.

It’s too noisy- the glass clinks too much, echoing all along the tunnel- but she can’t stop. It’s the first time she’s given in to the ache in her muscles since Voldemort showed up. 

Panic swallows her whole, red and bright.

Not tears. Lily’s hyperventilation has always been silent. 

She’d once- in the library- Mulciber-

Mary Macdonald had cried so hard, years and years ago, after Mulciber had raped her. Lily had held her, and then she’d gone to the library and proceeded to have a panic attack for the first time in her life. Hogwarts was supposed to be safe, but that had been the first time it was made clear to her: it wasn’t, it  _isn’t,_  and her world will never be safe unless she makes it so. She’d been silent then, and she’s silent now; her knees bruised in the dirt, her throat clogged with all the fear that she’s only able to feel now, hours and hours after the fact.

A distant shout breaks her out of her wet-eyed trembling.

Gritting her teeth, Lily apparates.

...

“Albus,” says Minerva, one hand resting on his shoulder.

He is so tired.

“There weren’t bodies,” Albus says, quietly.

“No,” replies Minerva. “But the home- did you see-”

“Yes. I saw.”

The sun had still been red, when Albus arrived- the kind of red that, in ages past, muggles would have called an omen. The Potters’ house had always been small and neatly kept, even when they were in the middle of moving; James had never been able to accept anything less.

It is now a ruin.

“I’ve moved the Longbottoms into Hogwarts, as you asked.” Minerva hesitates. “The Aurors arrested Sirius in Godric’s Hollow this morning. He’s being moved to Azkaban as we speak.”

He lifts his head. “They were such bright children.”

Minerva steps away, one hand white-knuckled on the balcony railing. The early morning light throws her face into sharp relief. She’s not looking at Albus; when she finally does, there’s a cast to it that makes him feel stung, like flame that’s eaten through wood and emerged into open air, hotter than expected.

“They made their decisions,” she says. “Sirius- I thought he loved them. I’ve never known anyone to love another so fiercely as that boy loved James Potter. I still don’t understand-” Minerva shakes her head, like a cat confronted with a threat, like a lioness thrown into a cage, denying a truth’s very existence. “I don’t understand,” she finishes, sadly.

Albus closes his hand over hers, soft on the marble.

“We will bury them in a few days.” 

He must meet with Severus, after this. That will be a difficult- and bitter- conversation, for Severus doesn’t do anything half as well as he does bitterness. And after- oh, after, there’s Remus, there’s Peter, there’s Alice, there’s Marlene- the Potters were well-loved, and that- that’s a rarity, right there, that love that burst into being around them. That kindness, that war always seemed to swallow whole, that they’d kept alive for so very long.

“I’ll be there,” says Minerva, before she walks away. 

 _We’ve lost too much,_ thinks Albus, weary and cold.  _These wars- we always lose our best to it._

(Poppy Pomfrey comes shrieking in before he can do anything more, salt-pepper hair askew, wand gripped tight.  _Thieves,_ she cries, sparks bleeding out of the end of her wand, purple and hot enough to scorch his carpets,  _took my entire stock of potions- locked me inside-_

They search for them, of course, but never find any more clues.)

Albus buries the Potters on a chilly winter morning, the graves just as empty as his hope, and the world continues spinning onwards.

...

James lives.

Lily shakes apart again, on the forest floor, but Harry brings her out of it- his sweet warmth, the weight that settles in her arms and refuses to be moved for anything.

“I almost lost you,” Lily whispers into his hair, flyaway spiky like his father. “I swear that won’t ever happen again, Hars. Your daddy and I are going to be right here. It’ll take more than a Dark Lord to kill us.”

Harry, one year old and proud of it, gums at her fingers. He’s got almost all his teeth, all save for the first four, so he looks like a beaver in reverse. Remus had once spent an entire afternoon warning James that Harry’s teeth would come in crooked.  _Those that don’t come first come crooked,_ he’d said, loud and flushed, and Lily had burned her fingers on the china from laughing through a spell.

 _Teeth’s not what that’s referring to,_ James had said. 

His glasses had been angled, Lily remembers- the sun had been shining from behind him, and the light had caught on the corner of his frames, rainbows splayed like vines all over her walls. She’s known a lot of happiness in her life, but never the kind that came with James, that he brought with him without meaning to; that belonged to him as inextricably as his glasses or his stupid collection of deer figurines.

“Peter was never crooked,” Lily says quietly, tearing up grass that Harry inspects curiously. James is asleep- properly asleep, not in a coma- in front of her, and she’s exhausted, but it’s a kind of exhausted that’s so tired she can’t find it in herself to sleep. “He never came first, but he never tried to cheat either. I always thought he’d be good for Hufflepuff because of it. But I guess loyalty wasn’t his thing.”

She has another hour before she can safely give James another dose of blood-replenishing potion, so Lily stretches out her toes and leans back, resting her skull against the moss. Harry’s a crawling weight pressed up against the side of her stomach. They’re all alone in the world, the three of them, and as safe as she can make them.

Lily stares into the sky, sunny and too-bright for November, right up until she can see spots across her vision even when she closes her eyes.

Those deer figurines, lovingly collected, polished, protected- are gone, now.

...

Remus holds a wooden deer. James had carved it when they were twelve, young and brash and fearless, sure the world would bend to them. The night after he told Remus he  _knew-_ knew what Remus was- he’d handed Remus a piece of wood that was so crudely carved it barely suggested the shape of a deer.

It had been a promise, though Remus hadn’t known it then. 

The figurine is worn smooth: softened by time, the hard edges rounded and shining. Remus hasn’t gone a day without it for almost a decade.

(In another world, Remus has a son. In another world, the tiny wooden figure’s secrets die with Remus, but the wood lives on, a loving part of Teddy Lupin’s childhood.)

In this world, Remus weeps, and salt stains the pale wood dark as night.

...

Once she thinks James can be moved without setting back his healing, Lily does, out of that forest and into another, further south.

Her father had been from Birmingham, a city boy born and true. But Lily’s mother had been from Wales- a small seaside town near Barmouth. It’s one of her oldest memories: clambering over rough stone and shale with Petunia up sheer cliffs, sleeping off the weariness in the caves, slipping and sliding in the rain. 

They apparate near enough to the cliffs, but scrambling up them with a one-year old and a comatose patient is enough to make Lily tear at her hair.

In the end, she hoists Harry in one hand and directs James’s stretcher with her wand.

It doesn’t go easy.

Lily swears loudly as her wand slips in her sweaty grip. It’s the fourth time it’s happened; every single time, her heart plummets as she scrambles to keep James aloft even as her transfigured shoes and clothes stick and slide along the sandy stone. Keeping her own balance is hard enough. Juggling Harry and James and a  _locomotor mortis_ that’s just extended enough to shift her center of balance- Lily can scarcely hold it all together.

When she finally enters one of the caves, Lily sets Harry down, guides James in, and then sinks to her own knees, wobbling.

She laughs, and there’s tears in it, but she doesn’t care; Lily is alive, and all her muscles are aching, and fear is curled in her gut, and she’s never felt so  _alive,_ every inch of her singing with the life still sewn deep into her blood and bone.

 _You tried to kill me,_ she thinks, fingers deep in damp sand, hair matted with sweat and dirt, her son crawling over too-sharp stone, her husband bloodied and broken next to her.  _You didn’t succeed._

...

Severus doesn’t flee.

He is not a Gryffindor; bright sunlight is not his to boast of. His inheritance is a dark cottage from the wrong side of town, a name with syllables that echo like a snake’s, and a mind to sharpen his wand and hone his tongue. 

(He’s lost his heart- that, at least, has been buried with Lily Evans in Godric’s Hollow’s cemetery.)

He remains in Hogwarts, in the darkness of the dungeons. Severus serves two masters and fights in a war that leaves him cold, a shell and a caricature; alive, despairing.

“I’m sorry,” says Dumbledore, and Severus hates him, viciously, like he’s never hated anything else: dizzying, all-consuming.

It isn’t courage that makes him stay. It isn’t intelligence, either- if Severus were smart, he’d flee to a hilly cabin in the middle of Asia, and never once look back.

It’s certainly not loyalty.

 _Self-knowledge,_ thinks Severus, as he restocks the infirmary with better potions than Slughorn had ever managed.  _I cannot live with myself if I run from the man who killed Lily, so I will remain._

 _Redemption,_ he thinks later, alone in his rooms, exhausted and bloody with the blood of others.  _There are sins that cannot be erased, but can be balanced._

Later, staring up at the Dark Lord’s throne, empty and pale as bone, Severus decides.

 _Hatred,_ he thinks, and lifts his wand aloft, green light blooming at the tip.  _I hate you, and you, and you-_

Three men die under his wand that night. Severus doesn’t regret any of it.

He doesn’t know of a life other than this.

...

The cave is low enough to have seaweed strewn over the floor. Lily spends the afternoon weaving it, between tending to James and playing with Harry. It pricks at her fingers, salt pruning the skin; Lily doesn’t care. It feels good to have something to physically do. 

That night, Harry falls asleep in her lap. Lily sits at the lip of the cave, cold wind blowing through her hair, watching the stars: they’re brighter than she’s ever seen them. The moon hangs full and fat over the horizon. She thinks there’s a storm on its way- when she was younger, Lily’d had the uncanny ability to know when to scramble home, getting to shelter minutes before a summer storm hit- but now, all she knows is the salt and stone and gentle wash of waves on sand, the prickle between her shoulderblades that could be from fear or from an encroaching storm or some actinic mix of both.

“Lils?”

Slowly, as if in a dream, Lily turns.

James is trying to sit up. He’s not able to- Lily’d managed to stick the bandages around his wrist to the bandages around his ribs, so half his body is practically immobile- but he’s awake, and struggling for it.

“Don’t-” Lily stands, and promptly forgets about Harry for a half-breath before her mind catches up with her body; she has to catch him and soothe him back to sleep before turning back to James, “-just lie back, there’s nothing you can-”

“Oh, fuck,” says James, slumping back onto the bed. Lily cuts herself off as his voice grows louder. “That  _hurts,_ goddamn.”

There’s a makeshift cradle in the corner of the cave that Lily built, stacking stones on top of each other and keeping it all together with a permanent sticking charm. It won’t do forever, but for a temporary bed, it’s good enough. She goes over there and deposits Harry into it, then returns to James.

Her hands are shaking, just a little.

“What hurts?”

James rolls his eyes at her. “Everything. My hand. My chest. My leg. My  _tongue,_ Lils, what happened that made my tongue burn, I don’t understand-”

“Um,” says Lily, “that might have been the blood-replenishers. Or the mix of bone-setting charms and blood-replenishers.”

“You tried to set my bones after giving me a blood replenisher?” James asks, aghast.

She flushes. “I was very worried.”

“It’s the first thing Pomfrey told us not to do!”

“I forgot.”

“It’s made people spontaneously  _combust!”_

“I forgot, Jimmy,” Lily says, stepping closer to him, sinking to her knees and slowly rubbing a lock of his hair between her fingers. It’s soft- it’s so much softer than it looks, and Lily always forgets that until she’s got it in her hands. “There was so much happening- I forgot.” She feels her lips twitch upwards, the smile quavery. “It all worked out, though, didn’t it?”

James sighs in quiet surrender, eyes drifting closed, and she lifts his unbandaged arm to drape it over her lap, heavy and warm.

“How long?” he asks.

“Three days,” Lily replies, soft and threadbare. All of her feels soft, suddenly, with James so warm next to her, his fingers threaded through her own, his hair curling against his temples in sharp, spiky angles. Relief comes in the form of lassitude, spreading rich warmth through her limbs. “D’you remember what happened?”

“I remember someone being a really bad trick-or-treater,” says James.

She huffs a laugh and settles down, next to James, shoulder to neck, arms settled across each other’s stomachs, hips pressed together, side-to-side. 

“I was scared,” Lily confesses, into the salty, sweaty side of James’ neck. “I thought you’d die- and that I’d have to teach Harry how to play Quidditch- you  _know_ how rubbish I am with brooms-”

James curls his uninjured arm up, the backs of his fingers brushing over her collarbone. “That’s the real tragedy here, isn’t it? Poor Hars, stuck with a mother who’d hide the brooms under the kitchen sink-”

“-it’s been four  _months,_ when’ll you let go of that?”

“Never,” announces James, and his eyes- those lovely, dark eyes- are bright as the stars outside when he tugs at her hair playfully. “The house is ruined now. Those poor brooms, they’ll never escape. Which means I can rag you on it forever.”

“Bastard,” says Lily, affectionately, settling closer to him.

She sleeps, and for just one night, Lily can hold her world in her arms.

For one long, lovely night, she lets herself believe she’s safe.

...

The next day, James sits up. 

Lily’d left in the morning and returned with a basket of apples, stolen from a nearby orchard. She’d taken Harry with her, which is why James feels free to swear: he hadn’t lied the night before, when he told Lily that every part of him hurt.

It isn’t like he isn’t grateful. James  _is,_ which is half the fucking problem. He’s stupidly, desperately grateful that he’s alive, that he can even feel the pain, that he isn’t buried in a cemetery, just another name of the war’s casualties.

But it’s difficult.

James is the healer, among his closest friends- he learned with Sirius and Remus, because werewolves aren’t gentle with their playmates and even if they aren’t turned into werewolves in their animagus forms, the injuries they incur are transferred. There had only been so many times Pomfrey wouldn’t have asked questions, so James had- in a spurt of insight that’s regrettable only in that he hasn’t had more of them- learned as much healing as he could, sneaking books out of the Hogwarts and Potter libraries with careful cunning.

James is the healer. He’s never been the healed.

And he’d never known, intimately, how truly infuriating it was, to be unable to move, to find it painful to fucking  _breathe-_

“James!”

“Lils?”

Lily enters, Harry balanced on her hip, a basket bumping in behind them. She hasn’t tied her hair up; it’s loose and wild around her face, and there’s such warm laughter in her eyes that James feels a smile curl at his own lips. 

“The charm went awry,” she says a little breathlessly, pressing a hand over Harry’s head as the basket swings in around them like a cumbersome bludger. “I put a little too much energy into- oh, Merlin-” Lily sets Harry down and he scrambles towards James, giggling. _“James,_ a little help would be-”

James reaches for his wand, but his fingers close on nothing. He remembers- his broken wrist, the twitch of his wand along the syllables of  _bombarda,_ fire and dust and blackness full of heat like hell’s own flames-

Amusement is extinguished like a candle.

“I can’t,” he says.

Lily turns to him. Whatever she sees in his face- it turns her quiet, and she silently removes her wand from her sleeve and waves it. The bucket clatters to the floor. James wraps one hand around Harry and stares, defiantly, angrily, at the cave floor.

He wants-

“I don’t have my wand,” says James. 

“No,” agrees Lily, moving into the room cautiously. “No- I had bigger things on my mind.”

“Than my wand.”

“Like your  _life,_  James.” 

His chest aches, from more than broken ribs.

“Lily-” James averts his face, before he lifts it to meet her gaze.  _“Lily.”_

After a long moment, she seats herself on the opposite cave wall. Her thick hair doesn’t leave her looking wild and free, now, but rather small. Pale and narrow and strained, under the bravado.

“What are we doing?” James asks quietly. 

“Running,” she answers. 

James runs his hand through Harry’s hair, leaning down and stamping a kiss to his forehead. God, he’s so small. He used to be even smaller. And there’s a madman out there who wants to kill him, all for being born at a particular time- James is so  _angry-_

He wants-

“Two of us,” says James. “Against an army.”

“We’re not dead yet.”

“And for how long’ll we last? Before one of them trips on us by complete accident- before- before- one of us makes a mistake! Because we will, this is  _why_ we didn’t go on the run before, this is why we decided to stay in a warded  _house!”_

Lily folds her arms over her knees. “That plan didn’t work out, James. It isn’t like we didn’t try. He’s killed entire families, burned down houses that have lasted for centuries. Or have you forgotten what happened to the McKinnons?”

The McKinnons were known for earth magic. Their Head- a crotchety old man named Martin- had denounced Voldemort in front of the Wizengamot for destroying the old groves in the north. Three days later, James had arrived at McKinnon Cottage to see it buried: attic to basement, a mountain where before there had been only a manor.

The McKinnons had been buried alive, from the Head to the youngest child.

“I haven’t forgotten,” James says hoarsely. “But Merlin, Lily, what were you thinking when you brought us to a forest?”

“I was thinking,” says Lily, slowly, “that I couldn’t trust anyone.”

_Oh, Morgana’s tits, this is-_

“We have to-”

“No,” says Lily, and shakes her hair over her shoulder, eyes so bright they score him right to the heart. “No, let’s talk about that, James. Peter betrayed us. He told Voldemort, and that leaves us here.”

“He could’ve been captured-”

“Jimmy,” says Lily, sadly, “do you believe that?”

 _Yes,_ thinks James.  _Yes, I believe that. I loved Peter, and he loved me, and he would never-_

“No,” is what comes out of his mouth, anguished and sharp-edged as a blade.

Lily doesn’t move- Harry, who’d been chewing on an apple core, abruptly throws it off to the side and starts crying at the sudden contraction of James’ arm around him- but Lily doesn’t react; she’s focused on James, and her eyes are soft, her entire face is so soft and sad and lovely, and James wants-

“You’re going to recover,” she says. “We’re going to survive, we’re going to  _live,_ and Voldemort will die before he can ever touch our son.” She sweeps forwards, hands cold as she grips his arm, their son hiccuping between them. “And nobody will stop us, James, not your friends, not my friends, not Albus, not the Order.”

“You don’t trust any of them?”

“Right now- I think we can keep this between us.”

James is a Potter.

People don’t understand- Potters aren’t like Blacks, aren’t like Malfoys. Family matters to Blacks; money matters to Malfoys. To Potters, it’s the  _legacy_ that’s important. Did you leave the world a better place than you entered it? Did you try your hardest, over and over again, at your lowest and your worst?

He’s so tired.

But there are times when he knows he’s growing up- when the world is cold, and his lungs aren’t quite large enough for his skin, and he wants nothing more than to shrink away; but his spine just doesn’t compress, his hands don’t shake, his eyes remain level- and James feels it now, in this small, wind-battered cave, his wife and son in his arms.

(There is one thing James Potter wants, desperately, stupidly, with everything that he has inside of him: to not be afraid.

He kisses Lily’s hair instead.)

“Yes,” says James. Let them come, werewolves and vampires and Death Eaters alike. There are two people here who will defy them. There are two Potters here, whose legacy is triumph. “Yes, let’s do this.”

...

Half of his face is scarred.

Voldemort does not scream, does not weep, does not falter, but-

But the Potters escaped. He knows they’re dead; there isn’t a chance for them to have survived on their own, and they haven’t reached out to any of their contacts in either the Wizarding or muggle worlds. He knows they’re dead, and he hates that their death has left a scar on him.

 _I will have them broken,_ he thinks, trailing sparks over his head- glamours following in its wake, replacing red, twisted skin with his familiar bone-pale appearance.  _When I take the government- when I hold this country- I will find their corpses. I will have their bodies stripped and whipped through every street of London._

“Blood will fall,” he whispers, magic eating through his vision and turning it bright as the sun. It hurts. Voldemort revels in it. “And from the impurity, Britain shall rise, stronger than ever before.”

...

Two days later, Lily goes to Diagon.

She dyes her hair black and charms her eyes brown, and wears a transfigured robe that’s more provocative than anything Lily would have worn by choice. A few sweeps of careful makeup later, her face looks decades older.

James and Harry remain behind. 

It’s dangerous. Lily knows it, knows what she’s risking, but- but they need money. Gold, or pounds, whichever is necessary; and it’s all sitting in a vault in Gringotts. 

Gringotts has been neutral thus far. Lily’s got hopes that it won’t change, but if the government ever falls... that’ll leave Gringotts with enough incentive to sell the information. And there are snitches everywhere.

If she’s smart enough, if she’s good enough, Lily will get access to the money.

Lily will be. 

She has to be, so she will be. 

“Be safe,” says James, hands warm and large on her shoulders. Lily can see the anger in him: he hates sitting quietly while anyone risks their lives, and this is worse than even hiding in Godric’s Hollow while the war rages around them. Lily lets herself slump into the warmth of his body for a long moment, and then she straightens. 

“Always,” she says. “And you- stay down, stay safe. I’ll be back soon.”

“Lily-”

She kisses him. Once. Hard, teeth and noses clashing, dizzying like a slap of hot air after an evening beside a river. 

Then she leans down and kisses Harry, and steps back, and lets the world resolve into a kaleidoscope of grey and green and blue.

“I love you,” mouths Lily, even as she disappears.

The crack of apparition echoes in the early morning, but Lily doesn’t flinch. She’s wearing high-heeled boots that click along the cobblestones; Lily deliberately makes the sounds as obnoxious as she can manage and strides forwards, towards Gringotts.

The people are quieter by far than when Lily first entered the Wizarding World. The shops are shuttered; people keep their heads down and their children close. It scratches something uncomfortable in her chest.

Inside- 

Inside, Lily walks over to the nearest teller.

“Good morning,” she says crisply. “I’m here to open certain vaults that have recently been closed by the bank.”

“Didn’t pay the maintenance fee?” asks the goblin.

Lily bristles, cold and disdainful. Dignity all but drips from her skin. “I arrived from  _Switzerland,”_ she says. “I have taken Portkey after Portkey, and your shabby excuse of a government just told me that I had to come all the way down here to open vaults that should have necessitated a will-reading-”

“Madam,” interrupts the goblin with a poorly-hidden roll of his eyes, “what do you want?”

“Open the Potter vaults,” snaps Lily.

The goblin blinks. “Impossible. The Lord and Lady Potter have been declared dead.”

“Do I look like a necromancer? I am not refuting that.” Lily lifts her wand and swishes it down, sparks spitting out of the end, scorching the wooden table. “I am not of Potter blood, but that is not the only way to become the owner of a house, is it?”

“There hasn’t been a-”

“The magic chose me,” says Lily, with relish. “I have, here, Lily Potter’s wand. And it works for me as well as it ever did for her.”

“Madam,” says the goblin, slowly, “where did you find a Lady’s  _wand-”_

This is the moment. 

Lily lifts the wand, and brings it down so quickly, so sharply, that the world goes dark. This is a simple enough ward; but it’s got enough moving parts that it’s a delicate affair, and is esoteric enough that Lily can be sure that people inside the bank won’t immediately know of it. But most importantly: it’s impressive, enough that the goblins will stop asking questions.

The torches gutter out a moment before the stones above their heads turn invisible; Lily tilts her head up and watches the sunlight fall on Gringotts’ marble floor for the first time since the first Rebellion’s peace treaty was signed and the walls were rebuilt.

Then she turns the wand in a slow rotation, and watches the anger on the goblins’ faces turn to fear as the sunlight turns dimmer and stormclouds start to form.

(People don’t pay attention in History of Magic. 

Lily hadn’t either, to be fair- but she’d read the books before and after. She knows that goblins hate sunlight. She also knows that hatred is not the same as fear.

Goblins hate sunlight.

Goblins  _fear_  rain.)

“Master goblin,” says Lily, softly, “open the vaults.”

...

It isn’t a permanent change, what she’s done to the ceiling. 

But it proves her point well enough, and was only slightly more straining to do than a strong Patronus. The goblins are cowed, Lily has access to the vaults, and once she’s down there she retrieves as many of the charmed objects as she can. There won’t be any more reason for her to enter Gringotts after this- the small pouches she shoves up her sleeves will directly funnel the money needed from the vault. There are even a few wands there, and Lily takes a random handful- they’ll be helpful for James, even if they won’t ever work as well for him as his mahogany wand- and ducks out without once looking relieved or pleased.

Displeasure is a pureblood’s bread and butter. Lily leans on that heavily- lip curling, eyes narrowed, ugliness sitting on her bones just as dramatically as the makeup.

When Lily steps out of the bank, relief still doesn’t lighten her shoulders.

Until she apparates, she can’t appear relieved. Lily moves with easy grace instead, towards one of the apparition points, right up until she sees-

Two children, scrambling away from-

 _No,_ thinks Lily, wand already in hand, sprinting forwards as spellfire bursts into being in the far distance. 

She knows that dark head of hair.

Bellatrix Black. No- Bellatrix Lestrange, now, because she’d married a man just as cruel as her, for all that Bellatrix is smarter by far. Lily’s faced her on the battlefield for a long time now.

(They’ve almost killed each other four times.)

“James is going to  _kill_ me,” she mutters under her breath, before picking up her skirts and running towards the screams.

...

Bellatrix is beautiful.

Lily’s not so prideful that she denies that- she knows it, like she knows that James is kind, like she knows that she loves Harry- but Bellatrix isn’t the kind of beauty that Lily’s ever known before. It’s the kind of beauty that Lily’d seen in the coal mines near her house, before she ever learned of magic: dark, deadly, ugly.

Dangerous.

“Get behind me,” she says to the two children frozen in the middle of the street. One of them is magic- Lily can feel it, tingling along her nerves, but the other looks so much like Petunia that her heart aches. They’re- both of them- crying. One of Lily’s hands drags them back, and the other slashes her wand down at Bellatrix, throwing her head over heels for all too brief a reprieve.

“Your parents?” demands Lily, still not turning towards them.

The younger girl- the magical one- says, shrilly, “They were right here!”

“The Professor said we’d be  _safe,”_ flares the older girl. “She promised. Our parents didn’t- we didn’t-”

“Tough beat,” agrees Lily, and tilts her head to one of the awnings. “Get inside, both of you, and don’t come out. If someone comes inside, smash their heads with the vases inside.”

“We’re not going to smash  _vases!”_

“McGonagall,” hisses the Petunia-lookalike, puffing up from the force of her outrage. “She said we wouldn’t have to worry. She told us-”

Lily glances back. Bellatrix is getting up. There’s blood running down one of her cheeks, painting one side of her face red. She looks demented. She looks furious.

“Listen to me,” says Lily, quietly, kneeling down to the girls’ height. She rubs away the tears from the magicless girl’s cheek. “This world is a lot of things, but safe isn’t one of them. And you can run from it if you want, but it’ll swallow you up sooner or later. Doesn’t matter if you don’t have magic. Only way to make it safer is to make it safer yourself, and sometimes that means-”

Bellatrix’s spell splashes against the ground, exactly where Lily’s hand had been just a moment previous.

“-smashing some vases,” finishes Lily, and turns, and doesn’t look behind her as she starts dueling Bellatrix.

...

Lily’s good at dueling.

Bellatrix is better.

...

There’s blood dribbling out of her ankle. 

It’s a shallow cut across her ankle, but Lily can barely walk; it must have severed tendons. Anti-apparition wards have been put up by the Death Eaters, so Lily knows nobody else is coming, not the aurors, not the Order. All she has is her own wand and wits. It’s not  _little;_ against most any other person, Lily might have bet on herself. But Bellatrix is better than Lily. She always has been.

She ducks into a side alley, trying to breathe through the pain, and throws up a few of the same wards that Voldemort had punched through. Bellatrix doesn’t have his raw power. This will last for just long enough that Lily can probably heal herself. That she can come up with a plan to-

As she peels the soaked linen from her skin, Lily has an idea.

 _Madness,_ she thinks, but she can’t deny that she can’t keep up what she’s doing. Bellatrix will just wear her down until Lily makes a fatal mistake. Lily needs an advantage that Bellatrix wouldn’t expect.

 _She doesn’t know who I am,_ thinks Lily, wildly, slowly severing the strip of cloth.  _So she won’t be expecting anything like our other duels._

Lily’s hidden her love of warding, of rituals, for ten years. She’s swallowed books whole, inhaled scraps of knowledge stolen from muggle historians and magical texts both. There’s only a handful of people she’d trust to know more about rituals than she does in the entire world.

 _Mayans?_ Lily shakes her head, bracing it against the stone wall behind her.  _No, their rituals take too much preparation. Egyptian?_ But Lily’s experience in Egyptian rituals come from Akhenaten’s reign, which relies on sunlight. And Lily isn’t going to rely on something that can be obscured by clouds or buildings or even a hand-

_Indian rituals take their ayurvedic principles too seriously, and I have no idea which type Bellatrix is. Chinese rituals are balanced by the elements, not numbers; that’ll go badly if I don’t keep the power constant for all of them, and that’ll be all but impossible in battle. The Australians..._

The Australians have a decent ritual for imprisoning people in bars of living wood. But the ritual needs singing, and Lily can’t carry a tune to save her life. 

Which means that she’ll need to develop her own ritual.

 _Greek rituals are quite forgiving of bastardization,_ she thinks, and draws two runes- the second one will spit out poison if the first is deactivated.  _Numerically significant numbers- three, seven, thirteen- three’s the easiest to manage._

Her fingers are still red from the cloth wound around her ankle.

Lily stares at it for a long minute. She hears Bellatrix shriek, distantly, as she triggers the secondary rune, mind racing. Lily has her own blood, soaked into the fabric of her robes. She has the girl’s tears, dried salt rubbed into her skin. 

 _Let’s do this,_ thinks Lily, mouth dry.  _Let us finish this._

A breath later, she explodes out of the alley with a flurry of spells. Straight into the main road, which is silent as a grave and larger, more space for the ritual to be executed. Bellatrix is right behind her, and they exchange more spells- not truly dangerous ones, just enough to drive the other backwards, thoughtless, more reaction than any action.

They settle, finally, into a circle: pacing slowly around each other, equidistant.

Lily drags her ankle alongside her, blood staining the sand beneath her shoes.

“I’ve never seen you before,” says Bellatrix, dark eyes alight, ferocious. 

“Oh,” replies Lily, wand aloft. “You have.”

“I never forget a face.”

She throws herself into a roll and lands on the opposite end of the circle, straight at Bellatrix, ankle throbbing and heart pounding. She shields Bellatrix’s reflexive volley and grins when she sees the straight furrow she’s left behind her in the sand. 

All Lily needs now is for one spell to connect. Just one. 

 _Calor,_ she thinks, desperately, and the silent spell leaves her wand, powerful enough to pierce Bellatrix’s shields.

Bellatrix flinches when it connects, but when there’s no effect beyond that she starts to laugh. “Mudblood loving leaves you  _weak,_ darling.”

Her cheeks flush. Lily watches hungrily, silently. She takes two steps back, three, and Bellatrix follows with quiet, stalking grace.

“Who’re you? From the Continent? You ought to have stayed away, poor dear. Maybe than you could’ve lived to see night.”

_Please, please, please-_

"Any last words?” Bellatrix asks, laughing, head tipping back.

One shining, brilliant drop of sweat falls from her temple, straight into the middle of the circle.

Rituals don’t need words. All they need is intent. Desire, deep as the springs of the sea- and Lily’s never wanted anything more in that moment than she’s wanted to kill Bellatrix.

“Blood, cut against my will,” says Lily, smiling nastily, furiously, alive, alive,  _alive._  “Tears, shed for injustice against innocents. And sweat, from cruelty unabated. Ah, Bellatrix, did you think you were getting out of this alive?”

Bellatrix’s face whitens. “What are you-”

“Theta,” says Lily. “The Greeks called it Thanatos. Do you remember who Thanatos was, Bella?”

“No,” she hisses.

“Yes,” replies Lily, stumbling back, pressing her back against the wall. She tilts her head up, to the sun, and she says, “Death.”

When she looks back, Bellatrix is dead.

...

Lily heals herself with a quick wave of her wand, gritting her teeth against the pain, and then goes to find the girls in the shop. The Alley is filling up with people once more, so Lily’s not that worried about being identified. She does take a cloak that was abandoned on the street, though, because tempting fate is never a good idea.

She doesn’t know what the girls’ parents look like, but she has a slowly-rising knowledge in the pit of her stomach- 

The younger girl gives a cry when she sees a woman’s skirt, and both of them take off. Lily winces when she sees her fear was correct: the girls’ mother is dead. By  _avada kedavra._ On their first visit to the Wizarding World. 

Their father stumbles out of the dust a few minutes later and swallows the younger girl up in an embrace. Lily backs away, slowly, but then the older girl- the one who looks like Petunia- looks up at her. She’s got blue eyes, like the sky above them, and her dishwater hair is drawn back into a high ponytail. By mutual agreement, they step away from the others, towards a shadowed awning.

“They would’ve killed us, too,” she says, voice wobbling. “If you hadn’t stopped her.”

Lily closes her eyes. The ritual had hurt, somewhere behind her ribs, and it still hurts to move. Bellatrix’s blood had soaked into the sand and stone of Diagon Alley and Lily had stepped forwards, had dug through her pockets methodically, because corpses still held secrets.

“I’m not your hero,” she replies. 

The girl’s jaw juts out. She’s not pretty, not at all, but she looks so incandescently angry- Lily can see Petunia in her, can’t stop seeing her sister, who hates her, who loathes Lily like Lily’s loathes murderers.

 _Lily’s_  a murderer. She has fourteen lives staining her hands.

“I hit two people with those vases. But the things they were doing-” she shivers, then looks disgusted with herself for such a reaction. “I can’t match up with that.”

“No,” agrees Lily. “You can’t.”

“Emily’s not going to leave this world,” she whispers.

“Listen- girl-” Lily feels the itch along her spine, the watchful eyes, and flinches. “We’re in the middle of a war. It isn’t always like this.”

“My name’s Irene.”

“Irene, then.” Lily sighs. “You want to know how I stopped her? Bellatrix? The lunatic who was trying to kill you? I took three things. My blood, and her sweat. And you know the third?” She puts a hand on Irene’s shoulder, feels the awkward angle of teenage bone and muscle. “Your tears.”

“’m not magic,” she says.

“Magic’s not everything,” Lily tells her. “There’s more in the world than the magic that we teach: right, and knowing you’re right, and fighting to make your world right. You’re a third of what killed Bellatrix fucking Lestrange. You and your magicless hands.”

Irene lifts her head, and she looks like she’s swallowed a star. “They killed my mum.”

“Yeah.”

“I can’t do what you did.”

“Nope.” Lily sighs, seeing the distinctive flash of aurors’ robes, and steps away, towards the area where the anti-apparition wards are flickering, faltering. “But people have been trying to kill Bellatrix for years,  _years,_  and you did, at- what, fourteen? That’s not something any other kid could’ve done.”

“They,” says Irene, “killed my  _mum.”_

Lily softens. “I know. I know, Irene. They killed my mum, too."

“Magic’s not everything.”

“Not even close,” Lily tells her.

Slowly, Irene nods. Lily moves further back, ready to disapparate, when Irene says, abruptly- “Wait- it’s- you never told me who you are.”

Lily thinks of theta, of death, of blood and salt and fear. She’s had the imprint of her wand on her palms for the past week; it hasn’t been more than a week since Voldemort stood in front of her, since Lily had been ready to die for her son. She’s never been so lonely, so tired, so-

She’s never been so fucking afraid.

But there’s a girl here, who looks like Petunia, who’s got a world at her fingertips that’s just killed her mother. She’s not looking at Lily like Lily’s a hero; she’s looking at Lily like Lily’s a shield, a sword, something solid against the danger of the world. 

(This girl’s tears just killed Bellatrix Lestrange.)

 _I dare,_ she thinks, Bellatrix’s blood mixing with her own on her hands, red and damning and terrible. A black cloak, stolen, is heavy around her hair.  _I am a flower of beauty. I am a flower of death. And I will not hide my face from the sun._

_I will not die quiet._

“Call me Thanatos,” says Lily, and apparates.


	2. will there be singing?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks of Harry, warm and small in his arms, a tiny, black-capped bundle that hadn't even been as long as his forearms, and shouts, _"Expecto Patronus!"_ and-
> 
> And-
> 
> And Prongs doesn't leap from his wand.

Lily lands just out of the cave and screams as she falls- she skids down two meters of sand before she manages to stop. Her ankle is definitely broken; Lily hisses out through her teeth and drags herself upright.

She limps into the cave sweaty and disheveled, and drops as soon as she’s within reach of James.

“Here,” says Lily, taking the small pouch she’d retrieved from Gringotts and tossing it at James. It’s charmed to be extensible, and featherlight. There’s twenty wands at the bottom. “Pick your wand.”

“Mummy?” asks Harry, reaching out to her dyed-black hair, eyes wide at the new color.

Lily leans back, dropping to an elbow, and groans when she jars her ankle. She lifts her other hand and catches Harry’s tiny fist in hers, stretching her fingers to bop his nose.

“Yeah, buddy,” she says, as lightly as she can manage. “Mummy’s hurt. And her hair’s messed up. Looks too much like your dad. Right ugly, don’t you think?”

“Hey!” yelps James.

Lily’s elbow slips out from under her. She laughs through the pain and holds her hand out, blindly, until James takes it. He’s so warm. Lily doesn’t close her eyes, doesn’t cry, but the ache behind her ribs eases, slowly, and all but disappears when Harry starts crawling over her prone body.

...

“What happened?” James asks, quietly, that night.

Lily’s ankle is bandaged. She’s got a scar along one arm from Voldemort that she hadn’t healed in time, and James is obsessed with it- the long, shallow cut, the way it’s fading back into her freckled skin- it’s a part of Lily that he doesn’t know, and James can’t stop sweeping his fingers over it. Harry’s asleep, half on his lap, half on Lily’s lap, and he’s never looked sweeter than with him sleep-heavy and warm.

“Bellatrix,” says Lily.

His heart skips a beat.  _“Lily.”_

“She was attacking in broad daylight,” Lily says quietly. “She killed a muggleborn girl’s mother. She would’ve killed the girl, her sister, their father- even more, likely- if I hadn’t stopped her.”

“Merlin, Lily,” James whispers, hand smoothing down Harry’s back in a vain attempt to regain his equilibrium. “I didn’t even know. If she’d killed you-”

“She didn’t.”

“But if she had?” He reaches for his wand when he can’t quite keep his hands from shaking. “I understand, I do, but- I’m allowed to worry, aren’t I?”

Lily presses her head against his neck. “Yes,” she says simply.

The fire flickers over her dark hair, red glinting through. The air outside their little cave is freezing, snow and ice frosting the ocean; but they’ve put up warming charms inside, and the stars are shining, and James swallows all the other words he wants to shout, winding his arms around Lily’s waist instead.

“She’s not going to be a problem now,” Lily whispers into his ear.

James pauses. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” says Lily, slowly, triumphantly, “that I killed her.”

...

 _Do you know how dangerous it is to make your own rituals?_ James wants to shout at Lily, at her shining eyes and her beautiful, beautiful lips. She might have died so easily.  _Do you know how many people have died, because they just tried something and failed and the ritual blew up in their face? Not even the most insane Death Eater would have tried what you tried._

But they’re Gryffindors.

Being Gryffindor doesn’t mean being insane, but sometimes- when on the wire, when pushed to the brink- it means taking risks that seem that way. It means gambling with your life, with your world, and never once looking to see the fall that’s snapping at your heels.

James holds Lily tighter, and he loves her with everything he has inside of him.

...

 

 

In one world, Bellatrix Lestrange outlives her Lord’s first death. She plans to take down his enemies while the rest of the Wizarding World celebrates, and destroys all the things her Lord gave her before she heads to the Longbottom’s house.

In another world, she dies before she can do any of that.

She dies before she can destroy her portkeys.

...

Bellatrix had six things in her pockets: a little book that was splattered over with blood; an extra wand; three quills; and a small, innocuous button that Lily had almost left behind.

The button’s the important thing.

When James runs tests on it, it proves to be a portkey.

There’s only one reason for a Death Eater to have a portkey masquerading as an innocent button.

Lily watches Harry run one finger over the broad, reflective edge, before she asks James, “You can get it to work?”

“It’s password locked,” replies James. “It’ll take me some time, but- yeah, I’ll be able to get it to take us where it needs to.” He knocks his hand on the stone of the wall. “That isn’t the question.”

“The question is whether we want to go there or not,” Lily finishes. “If we do- both of us will have to be ready.”

“Fighting fit,” murmurs James, lips twitching. “None of this- still-recovering business.”

Harry tries to chew on the button. Lily takes it out of his hands and tosses him in the air instead, catching him and rubbing her cheek against his soft hair, smiling at his giggling.

“This isn’t our fight,” she says, looking out into the sea, the horizon that she can’t exactly identify because the sea is the same shade as the sky. “We could hide here, and stay silent, and nobody would ever ask for more from us.”

“Would you be happy like that?” James asks curiously.

Lily glances over her shoulder at him. “Yes,” she says. “I would be happy. I wouldn’t be at peace, I think- but if I have you, and I have Harry- I can’t imagine being unhappy.”

He drops his head to her neck, nosing at the skin, one hand coming up to cup Harry’s head. “They’ve killed our parents,” says James. “They’ve killed our friends, and they’ve killed our family, and I can’t sleep without dreaming of  _him,_ in our home, the absolute bastard-”

“James,” Lily says, turning to face him. She looks up at him, through the curtain of her hair, and Lily is close enough to smell the apples on his breath, the clean salt, the dust and mud and blood. “It’s going to be difficult.”

“Our entire damn lives have been difficult,” says James. “Let’s not start being easy  _now.”_

...

(Lily’s always been too sharp for the world. It’s the kind of thing that’s smudged by death, but it doesn’t make it less true. Lily’s too sharp, too quick, not the kind to throw herself into danger unnecessarily, not the kind to hesitate when she feels it necessary. In another world, she’s remembered as a mother and a wife and a muggleborn.)

(In this one, she is called  _death,_ and it is a name she chose for herself.)

...

“You carved  _runes_ into your skin?” James demands, flipping her hand over and dragging her closer to him. “Lily!”

“I had to tell the magic,” she says, yanking her hand back. “In Gringotts- I didn’t know how the bags or wand-boxes would look. So I did it. And that’s how I knew the button was important, too- there was magic in it,  _his_ magic. All cold and frightening and rotten.”

Old druidic runes stand up on her skin, bright red, scarred.

Lily’s sharpness isn’t borne just of her tongue. Her sharpness comes from her knowledge: she’s doing right. And so long as she does right, she won’t regret her actions.

The pain is a price to pay. Nothing less.

“Sometimes you frighten me,” whispers James, thumb brushing against the raised, knotted edge of one of the runes.

Lily leans into James and kisses him softly, lips barely moving.

She thinks of a twelve year old boy who refused to be frightened by a werewolf. She thinks of a sixteen year old boy who’d refused to be complicit in murder. She thinks of a twenty-one year old boy, who’d stood against the cruelest, darkest man in fifty years not once, not twice, not thrice- four times, each with nothing but a wand in his hand and love in his heart.

Lily is not the only one who’s too sharp for the world.

 _This world isn’t safe,_ she thinks, love blossoming through her limbs like warmth, like light.  _So we must make it safe._

Voldemort and his men brought war to Hogwarts’ walls. They let a generation of children grow, none of whom knew peace, all of whom knew love. Lily can’t think of anything more dangerous to the Death Eater’s philosophy.

"We all do,” she whispers back.

Lily’s outlived her heroes. She’ll outlive her enemies, too.

...

Two weeks later, they disguise Harry with three layers of charms and drop him off at a one-day daycare. Lily drapes Death Eater robes over their heads, fastens the mask to James head and lets him do the same to her. 

They don’t land in any dungeons.

Instead, they land in a field.

Lily feels James cast protective shields; she narrows her eyes and looks up instead, towards the hill that she can feel pushing at her mind.  _Leave,_ it whispers.  _Don’t come near me._

And underneath it all, there’s a slow pulse that reminds Lily of something achingly familiar.

“There’s no active magic around,” James mumbles, sweeping his wand in slow circles. “Nobody’s cast in...”

“Forty years?” Lily looks over her shoulder to see him lift a brow at her.

“How’d you get that? The best spells only go till a decade.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “I developed it before I went to Gringotts. How else d’you think I managed to get all the stuff I wanted? I wasn’t sure how it’d look, and the goblins weren’t exactly going to be helpful.”

“So you  _created_  a spell.”

“I’m good at that,” Lily agrees, before tilting her head at the hill. “There’s magic that side, though, and it’s long-lasting. With notice-me-not charms all over it.”

James’ hand knocks into Lily’s arm, but he doesn’t say anything- instead, they head towards the hill. Lily keeps her grip on her wand easy, the better for the quick movements needed in both breaking and forming wards. She trusts in James’ auror training to look out for physical dangers.

“Village’s name-” James kicks at a moldy wooden sign, flipping it over. “Little Hangleton, apparently.”

Lily shrugs. “Never heard of it.”

They arrive at the hill. Lily can make out that the notice-me-not charms are tied into four trees, forming a proper rhombus at the base of the hill. She just brute-forces her way through it; notice-me-nots are fairly fragile charms, overall, relying more on going unnoticed- rather than on sheer power.

When the charms fall, Lily frowns.

There’s a cabin there, in the middle of the clearing, but it-

“It looks like a  _hovel,”_ says James, flicking his wand to check for glamours. “What kind of-”

He cuts off when a pack of snakes emerge out of one of the windows, slithering directly at them. Lily tries to dispel them- she’d thought they were a good illusion- but no, the tracks they leave behind them in the grass tells Lily that they’re actually real.

“He’s a Parselmouth!” James exclaims, before he sends a piercing hex directly at the quickest-moving one. It explodes in a shower of guts and viscera. “That’s why the snakes are real- they’re probably forced to obey-”

Lily doesn’t blink. “Ignis,” she snaps, directing her wand in a circle that corrals the snakes away from them. “James, take the far end. Circle them properly.”

James climbs the nearby tree and closes the circle from that height; the snakes die, leaving behind a large swath of burned grass and a horrible stench in the air. When they step closer to the hovel, she realizes:  _another_ notice-me-not, this one even more powerful- even more insidious- than the last.

Dark magic hums in the air, just enough to make her grit her teeth. And right under it, like a heartbeat: something Lily knows. Something that frightens her, just a little, because magic isn’t supposed to be  _slow,_ it’s supposed to eddy and dance and-

“Down!” grunts James, jumping off the branch and straight onto her back.

Lily spits out grass and rolls. “The hell was-” she trails off, seeing the silver axe spitting the tree that James had just climbed.

If he hadn’t dived on top of her, Lily would be dead. She exhales roughly and shoves herself upright.

“He’s not messing around,” James mutters.

Lily narrows her eyes at the handle. “It’s Norse,” she says, then swears, fluently, at the message she can see in the runes carved into it. “Norse- Merlin, James, the name’s-”

He barks out a warning- Lily spins to the side, feeling something rustle along her ribs and scoring a bloody line across it-

She pants, staring at the scorch marks impacting the tree trunk, one hand held to her side.

“What’d you say?” calls James.

“Wolf-killer,” spits Lily, before she rises and lobs a ward-eating curse at the window the snakes came out of. She drops and turns to face James. She can feel her anger surge, swirling in her gut. Her wand’s handle digs into her palm, hard and unyielding. “It’s Thor Odinson’s.”

James stills. “You don’t mean Deathlight?”

Thor Odinson had not been a god. He’d been a wizard, born millennia before the Founders- and he’d been a powerful one at that. For two centuries, he’d conquered and held Europe together, safe against the Persians and Macedonians.

He’d been a Dark Lord.

When his daughter was turned into a werewolf, Thor had slaughtered her and the entire village that allowed it to happen. Then he’d gone on a rampage against werewolves, and to do that, he’d forged a silver axe that- even as it split the tree behind Lily’s head- was bathed in more blood than any other weapon in the history of the world.

The populations of werewolves in Scandinavia has never recovered.

There’s a reason why they’re a problem that England’s faced, and not the rest of the Continent.

"Oh,” says Lily, reaching forwards and yanking the axe out of the trunk, hefting it carefully- “I do.”

...

They carve out a hole in the hut with the silver axe next to the window the snakes emerged out of.

Lily freezes when they enter, eyes narrowing on one of the corners, where there’s an intricately carved wooden box. “It sounds-” she shakes her head like she wants to clear it, “-like you. Like your magic, James.”

“Good or bad?”

Lily thinks for a moment. “Bad,” she says finally. “Magic’s not supposed to be slow, and that’s what this is.”

“My magic’s slow?” James asks, contemplating the box.

“No. Something you had...” Lily clicks her tongue. “That’s it. Not  _you,_ something you always had around you. Your cloak.”

James’ breath hitches. “But that wasn’t ever dangerous.”  _Dark._

“Maybe,” says Lily. “But there’s something darker than that, too, here. It’s- difficult to explain.”

“Be careful,” James tells her.

Lily moves slowly towards the box. Her wand flicks through a complicated series of motions and the box starts to glow. Then Lily brings her wand in a decisive swish towards it- but nothing happens.

She frowns and slashes at it, quickly, but the yellow light that cuts across the wood doesn’t have a single effect.

“It’s not so bad, closer to it,” Lily mumbles, before reaching for the thin latch holding the box closed.

“Lily-”

“It’s warm,” she says, before she opens it.

Inside, James can see dusty velvet and a gaudy, ugly ring. It doesn’t look like much, but Lily- when he looks at her, she looks captivated. Her green eyes are all but glowing; she’s not blinking.

“Lily,” says James, a pit growing in his belly. 

She doesn’t answer.

Instead, Lily reaches for the ring.

James flicks it closed and holds his hands up when she whirls on him, outraged. 

“You looked like it was drawing you in,” he says slowly. 

Lily snarls incoherently.

“I take that back,” James mutters, backing away. “Clearly it’s already-”

Lily moves, then, with devastating speed: she throws James into the far wall. If James’ ribs hadn’t been healed to perfect health, the impact would have probably been enough to have him down. But he’s healed.

So James throws up sand, straight into the air, and rolls to the side, throwing a wide-range buzzing spell that’ll keep Lily busy until he can subdue her.

It’s a solid plan.

James is a better dueler than Lily. He’s got more experience, he’s quicker with his wand, and his spells are generally geared towards the explosive; Lily’s slower, but more devastating when her plan snaps into place.

Except now she’s faster, ten times faster than James has ever seen her-

First she dissipates the sand wordlessly. Then she volleys forwards, with a purple-flecked-black spell that James hasn’t even heard of; he dodges instead of risking it with a shield. The spell hits the wooden wall behind his head in the place of his head.

James almost sighs in relief.

But Lily smiles.

Slow, coldly amused, terrifying. James’s never seen her look so cold before. Lily’s warm, always, even when she’s angry; she shouts and screams and doesn’t ever look like  _this,_ like she’s got the world in the palm of her hand and is ready to catch it under the delicate point of an eyetooth-

“Lils,” James pants, throwing up more harmless jinxes that she bats aside as if they’re nothing more than minor inconveniences, “Lily- goddammit-  _stop_ for a moment-”

He realizes, too late, what that purple spell was supposed to do, when vines snake around his arms and drag him back. One wrenches his wrist backwards until he’s forced to give up the wand; James grits his teeth and strains against it.

“This isn’t you,” he tells her. 

Lily’s eyes are glassy, empty. Sheened over like someone’s covered them with a lens.

“Darling,” she coos, voice sickeningly sweet, “this  _is_ me. The most me. Without you around to drag me down, who knows what I’ll become?”

“A killer,” grunts James, even as the vines press him against the wall. 

Lily laughs. She steps closer to him and rubs her wand down James’ cheek, soft and caressing. He doesn’t move; only glares at her, at her eyes, where it’s clear that she isn’t in her right mind.

“I’m already a killer,” says Lily. “Or did you forget about Bella?”

She turns, moving towards the box that James had closed- turning her back on him for a critical moment.

Because James knows what he saw.

Her eyes- her lovely, sharp, green eyes- the part of her that James loves the most, the part that he can sketch with his own eyes closed, the part that he’s been staring at so closely for the past moments- flickered red.

 _Bella,_ thinks James.  _Not Bellatrix. And red eyes._

There’s only one person he knows with red eyes.

It makes a sick kind of sense. This is what they’d feared, why they’d worn Death Eater robes; Voldemort.

Voldemort, who James had blown up.

Voldemort, who killed James’ parents, who tried to kill James’ son, who even now is trying to kill his wife.

 _I am a Potter,_ thinks James, and his fury in that moment- it’s been building, seething, over ragged wounds and festering helplessness and magical objects that hold the blood of thousands of innocents- but it boils over then, exactly, at the moment that he thinks his own familial name.  _I am James fucking Potter, and_ you- _I will not let you take anything else from me!_

He flexes his wrist, and feels something cold and hard under it. James twists to see it. Thor’s axe is right there, under his fingers, silver and shining. Uncertainty thrums through his chest for a brief moment; there’s hundreds of stories through history, of the axe rejecting Thor, of the axe killing Thor’s sons when they tried to take up his mantle, of the axe’s bloody, terrible history.

Then he looks up to Lily, and sees her cradling the ring, close to her chest, as if it’s Harry.

James sees red.

The vines around his wrists snap off, burned to ashes under the force of his rage, and before they can grow back, even as Lily spins around, eyes shining scarlet, wand rising to curse him to oblivion and back-

James raises the silver axe straight into the air.

For the first time in five thousand years, Thor Odinson’s axe flares white.

Lightning splits the world apart around them.

...

_Lightning is the symbol of death. It’s the life-bringer, and the death-caller._

_The first life in all the universe was born amid lightning and violence._

_There are things in this world that will not leave it without the same violence._

These are all truths that Lily Potter knows.

...

Hundreds of miles away, Lord Voldemort stands in front of the Ministry of Magic, flanked by his army. His gut shivers, rolling with anticipation, thick and sweet in his mouth.

"Take it,” says Voldemort, and the very building trembles.

...

Three floors away, trapped inside the building they’re supposed to work inside, are the aurors. Rufus Scrimgeour snarls under his breath, but he’s well and truly beat: there are five Death Eaters to every auror.

And once they take the office, they’ll be able to find the rest of the force easily. There’s trackers that map to each auror, on a magical map pinned up in the bullpen.

“Stand down,” says the leader, a broad man in black robes and a white mask. “If you cooperate, there won’t be anything to fear.”

Rufus grits his teeth and feels a shiver wrack his body. Blasted dementors- useful for nothing so much as-

 _Fuck,_ he thinks, as You-Know-Who’s army breaches the Ministry of Magic.  _Fuck this._

Britain hasn’t once fallen to the Dark. Other countries have. Time and time again: France, Prussia, the city-states of Greece; some even have cycles of light and dark, alternating and equal in power. The Aztecs used almost solely dark magic. The fall of the Zhou dynasty in China had led to such a resurgence of dark power that it still hurts Rufus’ teeth to go near a full three-fourths of the country. Some of the ziggurats in Mesopotamia had been built to worship muggle gods, but the majority were constructed to aid in ancient Akkadian rituals that harnessed the sun’s power for longer-lasting, dark potions.

But Britain?

Brittany had almost fallen to Mordred, to Morgana; but it hadn’t actually collapsed. Grindelwald’s reluctance to cross the Channel hadn’t been entirely because of Dumbledore: the very earth, the very soil and stone- it’s steeped in light magic.

There’s dark magic, of course, as always; light magic’s mirror and opposite, but it’s never held control of the land.

It’s never governed magical Britain.

And now, there is one place that even has a chance to stand against it. If they don’t want the elements themselves to recoil on the highest bastion of light’s defilement- the Ministry is finished. It’s Hogwarts, now, that is their last hope.

Hogwarts must not fall.

Rufus is an auror. He’s a Slytherin, and he loves the Light like he loves his duty. He is a Slytherin: he understands sacrifice.

“Augustus,” he says, standing. His people- good witches and wizards- shift, allow him an unimpeded line of sight to a man Rufus would like nothing more than to strangle bare-handed. Augustus Rookwood, a boy Rufus had roomed with for seven long years. “You could have been great.”

“I am,” says Augustus, lifting his hands. “I’m the lieutenant of the most powerful wizard in the world. And now you can join me, Rufus. There’s no need for you to be limited by the Ministry’s stupid, bureaucratic minutiae.”

Rufus smiles and watches Augustus relax. One of his deputies- a muggleborn girl, with some of the quickest wandwork he’d ever seen- flinches, in the corner of his eye; then she straightens, and holds her wand at a sharp angle. Rufus can all but see the curse on the tip of her tongue.

 _Do or die,_ thinks Rufus, vaguely amused, viciously angry.  _That’s what the muggles say, isn’t it? This is that moment._

This is what he’ll be remembered for.

He says, loudly, “If you’d ever looked beyond the tip of your nose, Gussy, you’d know that I’ve never wanted anything other than this Ministry’s stupid bureaucratic minutiae.”

He twitches his wand, one precise, clockwise circle, and brings the physical wards crashing down.

Only the Head Auror can do it. It’s not told explicitly to them when they take their oaths, but Rufus knows the laws like he knows his magic. He knows his capabilities. And the wards are keyed to the Head Auror, not the Minister, not any Department Head. Though it hurts in him like a stab- he brings the wards down, and brings the Ministry down with it.

The floor rolls, as the ward stones holding the entire building together collapse.

“What have you done?” Augustus shouts, trying to find his balance.

 _Made your life harder._ Rufus slips to one knee and rolls to the side, dodging the flashes of green light.

“Sir!” screams one of the rookies, not a foot from his face, crouched behind a desk, half-hysterical. “We’re not getting out of this alive!”

“No,” says Rufus grimly. “That, we are not.”

He takes aim, accurate and precise, and fires. Two Death Eaters fall, dead, and Rufus shakes out his hand, his leg that still cramps on bad days. Rufus is not a Gryffindor; bravery is not bred in him.

But ambition is.

...

(Of all the people who fought in the war, against Voldemort and for him, Rufus Scrimgeour’s tally is the highest.)

...

Frank holds Neville. Alice’s hands are tight on the  _Prophet-_  there’s a rip down the middle, sharp and thin, from her hands clenching against it. This morning’s paper has just arrived. It has Malfoy sneering from the front page. It has Lestrange smiling- smiling!- beside him.

(The last thing they’d printed, the last thing that hadn’t been Death Eater propaganda; Alice has it saved.

It’s been the point of discussion of multiple Order meetings. The swirl of dark cloth as Thanatos apparates away- the picture had graced the front of multiple  _Prophet_ covers ever since Bellatrix died. But that isn’t what caught Alice’s attention.

There’s a girl, narrow and pointy, with colorless hair- she stands in the middle of the street and glares at the photographer. She wears muggle clothing; doesn’t have a wand in sight, despite being Hogwarts-age. Alice is certain she’s a muggle.

She’s quoted, in small, cramped print, as if printed in a hurry: “This world isn’t safe. And the only way to make it safer is to make sure it’s safer ourselves.”)

 _I am an auror,_ Alice thinks, before she rips the paper in her hands firmly, straight down the middle and into two.  _Whatever that means now._

This morning, at breakfast, a hundred Patronuses soared in from aurors that Alice had known, had loved, had protected. She’s never seen a lovelier sight, how the world had turned shining and bright in a single moment that seemed to last forever.

And then one of them landed at the Head Table: a lion, grizzled, with one ear torn raggedly and a long scar down its flank.

“The Ministry has fallen,” it had boomed in Rufus’ rough voice, and through the shrieks of fear from the students, Alice had seen Minerva go pale, Albus sag in his chair, Filius flinch hard enough to rattle his top hat.

Alice is an auror, like Rufus, like James, like Frank.

Her wand is cold in her hand. She knows, in her heart, deep and true: it will see battle soon.

...

Lily is blind.

She can feel the earth under her knees, the hard, hot edges of the ring under one palm, the shattered pieces of the wooden box that had held it. Her ears are ringing. She’s hiccuping, just a little. But the bright white lights are still spotting her vision, and Lily can’t find it in herself to try to blink them away.

Her chest is too fragile to risk movement.

The world had felt so perfect. For long, breathless heartbeats, Lily’s world had been made of light and right and weightless beauty. For weeks now, she’s had to make decisions that leave her questioning, doubtful; she’s spent weeks doing the best she can, and Lily’s certain that it isn’t good enough.

She wants to go back to that perfect world now, now that she knows how lovely it can be. Unquestioning adoration. Doubtless freedom. 

Lily feels coldness on her cheeks and knows she’s weeping, but she can’t stop. She bends over, and there’s a rawness in her throat but Lily can’t hear her screams through the ringing in her ears; she can’t move at all, she’s so afraid of what will happen- if she hurts James, if he’s  _gone_ or stuck in her brain besides all the memories Lily has of loving Harry and James and-

_Oh-_

In the life Lily had before magic, she’d attended church. She doesn’t remember much of it; her mother had been the only person in their family who’d been religious, and Lily’d always been closer to her father anyhow. 

But she thinks about the psalms now, the songs, the chants, those rhythms that had reverberated below her breastbone in a place that magic’s never managed to touch.

She’s so fucking afraid.

Then she feels James, his hands large and gentle, so gentle, along her spine. Lily cants into his touch blindly; she can’t help it. Her muscles feel over-stretched and aching, her bones feel like they’ll shatter against one wrong touch, and she feels violated like she’s never felt before.

Steadily, even as her skin scrapes and aches, James gathers himself around her.

She can feel his chest rumbling soothing sounds, even as she can’t hear them. It’s James, of the two of them, who loves poetry- Lily’s too impatient for it- but in the warmth and scent of James, surrounding her all over, Lily can hear the echoes of a prayer. 

Slowly, achingly slowly, Lily blinks her eyes open.

Through the brilliance of the white spots, she sees James’ dark hair. She’d know that shade anywhere; Lily reaches for it, feels the soft spikes that curl and rub against her skin. Then she turns to James and meets his eyes.

He relaxes.

“You looked different,” he whispers, settling on the ground and bringing Lily closer to his chest. “When- when  _he_ had you. Your eyes were red.”

Lily thinks about the warmth that suffused her limbs. She’s never been under the Imperius before, but she can’t imagine that there’ll be much difference there; the knowledge of her own weakness burns in her chest like acid.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her voice rasps, thick in her throat. “I’m- I- I hadn’t realized what was happening. It was- it was so  _warm,_ and I’ve only ever felt dark magic as cold, and he was so persuasive-”

“Lils,” says James, and she breaks off. “I don’t blame you.”

“You  _should,”_ says Lily. 

James shakes his head. “Don’t be stupid.”

It’s the fondness in his voice that makes the tears come again: exasperated, patient love. He doesn’t flinch from Lily; he drags her closer, keeps her grounded, and Lily’s never before trusted someone so implicitly. So wholly. 

“I didn’t hurt you?”

He huffs a laugh against her ear. “Your vines sprained my wrist, I think,” he says. “But then- well, I didn’t help matters any either.”

Lily frowns. “What  _did_ you do? The ring-” she looks down, and sees it- it’s warm, yes, but not in the pulsing, living manner it had been before. It’s a smoking, burned-out shell instead; a blackened husk. Lily twists around to meet James’ eyes, almost clocking him in the jaw with her skull. “Jimmy!”

“Yeah.” James nudges the metal ring with his toe. “I think I overdid it?”

“What did you  _do?”_

“I, ah, got angry.” He looks sheepish, the idiot. “At  _him,_ right? I mean- he’s taken so fucking much- and I was just- well. Angry. And my accidental magic’s always taken the form of fire, so your vines? They got burned.”

“All of them?” Lily asks slowly. The amount of magic that would take- wandless magic is usually stronger than wand magic, but less directed; to match a wand’s spell and completely undo it would likely take more than ten times the magic needed for a wand spell.

James shakes his head. “Just my wrist. Half my arm. D’you know what was right there, though? That I could catch?”

Lily reaches for his arm and runs her fingers over the half of it that’s pink and hairless, as if something’s just plucked all of the hair out.

“Jimmy,” she breathes, as she turns his hand over and sees the livid rune carved into his wrist.

“Thor’s axe,” says James softly.

Her heart stutters. “You did  _what?”_ Lily demands, digging her nails into James’ skin. “I couldn’t possible have heard you correctly- James-  _Thor’s axe-”_

“I wasn’t exactly thinking.”

“Oh, that’s obvious.” Lily lets go of him. “It’s called Deathlight, James, have you lost your  _mind?”_

James looks like he’s chewing on his cheek. “Listen. I think- it’s wrong.”

“Four thousand years of history, and you’re going to prove everyone wrong?” Lily snaps. 

“Yeah,” says James, starting to sound irritable. “Because I’ve actually seen it work, Lily, and I think I know more about it than some stuffy witch translating pen marks that’ve been translated a dozen times before her?”

Lily bites her tongue, jaw working for a long moment. Then she sighs, waving her hand. “Yes,” she says crossly. “Yes, alright, that’s a fair point.”

James nods. “I don’t think it’s Dark.”

“James-”

 _“Because-”_ he breaks off, lifting his brows questioningly, until she nods. “Because you’ve all assumed it’s death  _of_ light, haven’t you? That’s what Deathlight means.”

“...yes.”

“Can you think of another meaning?” James asks quietly.

There’s a spark in his eyes- and it’s that thought, that light there, that gives her the answer. 

“No,” says Lily, jumping to her feet. She sways- the world sways- but Lily keeps to her feet and glares at James.  _“James._ You can’t possibly be serious!”

“Deathlight,” says James, spreading his hands, revealing the rune, inflamed, livid, vivid: lightning, carved dark against his unmarked skin. “Lightning, Lily.”

Lily closes her eyes. She can see it, now that she knows what it is: a blinding, brilliant bolt of white light, searing down through the roof of the hut; it had shattered the wooden box that had held the ring, and completely destroyed the ring itself. There had been a high, electric whine in the air- that must have been what made her ears ring.

She breathes. Her chest aches, in the same spot that had hurt to kill Bellatrix. Lily’s hands are empty, her wand lying on the ground. She closes them into fists and folds her arms over her chest instead.

“Where’s the bloody axe now?”

“It listens to me,” James tells her, rubbing one hand over the back of his neck self-consciously. “I just had to will it- and it disappeared.”

Lily grips the wooden chair tightly. “And you can call it back?”

James holds out his hand and his brows furrow, before his arm jerks- Lily inhales sharply as the axe materializes out of thin air, as if James’d just conjured it. But when she approaches it, she can feel the promise of violence just leashed in its silver handle, in its shining blade; Lily can’t feel the darkness that had permeated it. 

Not that she trusts her instincts now.

“James,” she whispers.

“It’s dangerous?” asks James, wryly. 

 _We are both too sharp for this world,_ Lily thinks, sadly, tracing James’ cut lip, the shadow of a bruise ringing one temple. They’ve both had so much worse than this.  _When will we ever stop bleeding?_

James’ skin is glowing from the silver light of the axe. Lightning, Lily thinks; deathlight, lovely, dangerous.

“Yes,” says Lily, reaching up to press a kiss to his lips. “But that hardly matters now, does it?”

...

“You need to get your head on straight,” James tells Lily.  _“We_  need to get our heads on straight. It isn’t even noon- Harry can stay in the daycare ‘til evening. Let’s go to Diagon.”

“James,” sighs Lily.

But James knows Lily; he knows how much it shakes her, to be doing the wrong thing. He knows how much it hurts her, to be doing the wrong thing and feel like she’s doing the right. To someone who lives with certainties, to have them shaken- James knows well, how that feels.

(James lives with others, depends on those that he calls family to love him and support him. 

Peter betrayed that.

There hasn’t been a single night in the past three weeks that James hasn’t woken up from a nightmare.)

“We’ll have hot tea,” he coaxes instead, reaching out and catching Lily’s hand. “Hot tea, with milk and honey. Not the watery stuff we’ve had for the past couple weeks.”

Lily closes her eyes tightly, then she nods, once.

James apparates them straight to London.

...

They slip into the Leaky Cauldron quietly, and wait in silence until their tea arrives. Lily tries to soak the warmth of the cup into her bones, where she feels as if winter has sunk into it. 

There’s marrow there, Lily knows, in the hollows of her bones. It’s where her body is born. Her blood- the vast majority of it- is made up of cells that last for only four months. Give her a year, and her blood will be formed anew thrice over. Right there, in the hollow, hallow shadows of her bones, there’s ice and darkness alongside all the parts of her that aren’t old enough to become anything.

James looks haggard, too. He’s charmed his hair blonde, and Lily’s hair’s some halfway shade between red and black; they’re both huddled in a small corner booth and curled over their cups silently, letting the steam catch on their face’s skin.

Lily rubs her finger over the smooth wood of the tabletop. 

There’s no varnish. It’s age that’s worn it down, not polish. Lily wonders how many tears have soaked into the wood, how much beer and grief and joy.

“James,” she whispers, reaching out one hand to his. She rests it on the table, upturned, waiting for him to press his palm back to hers. “I’m so afraid.”

She shouldn’t be. Lily knows how to defeat death. She  _knows,_ down deep in her blood and bone. You defeat death by accepting it, and she has to, she  _has_ to accept death before she can save James and Harry and-

“You know what we call insane?”

James’ face is thinner than Lily’s ever seen it. There’s a gauntness to his face that makes Lily want to take him and kiss his pain out of his muscles, a pallid cast to his face that makes her viciously, terribly angry. His hair is blond and his eyes are dark and there’s a spark in that darkness that reminds Lily of death and fear and brilliant, shining, lovely light.

_Lightning._

“What?”

“Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” Lily clutches tighter at James’ hand. “How many times can we fight against  _him_ before we’re defeated? How much- how much can we lose before we lose our-”

Suddenly, James smiles and Lily stops. The shadows darkening his face don’t fade; they deepen. He looks angry, and regal, all at once, like the busts of Arthur and Gryffindor brought to life once more. 

“We’re Gryffindors,” he says. “And that doesn’t mean being insane, maybe, but sometimes it means looking insane.”

“James,” she says quietly.

“Lily,” he returns, eyes alit, silvered. “Our family isn’t dead. And so long as our son is alive, he won’t stop coming after us. I’m not letting him have Harry.”

“I’m af-” Lily freezes.

James tries to turn to see what she’s looking at, but Lily tightens her grip on his hand until he stops. She knows she’s lost what little color she had- her heart is pounding in her ears, loud, drowning out everything else.

“Fuck,” she breathes.

“Lils-”

“Don’t  _move,”_ Lily hisses, reaching for her wand and sliding it off the table silently. “Don’t call anyone’s attention- we can’t-”

“Then tell me what’s going on!”

“The day’s paper just came,” she whispers, eyes flicking over the pub. 

James frowns. “This late?”

Lily knows her hands are shaking. They’re too late-

“It wasn’t there when we came in. I thought it was because we weren’t here in the morning, that they’d run out- but they just delivered it.” She meets James’ eyes, and shivers convulsively. “Malfoy’s on the front cover.”

“Lily-” he twists around, sees the front page that Lily’s been seeing, and turns back to her, dead-white. “We have to get out of here.”

“We have to find out what’s happening.” She straightens and swallows, hard. “Three weeks was too long. If he has control of our government- well, Jesus, James, we have to move faster. Find out what that bloody artifact was in Little Hangleton, see how to kill a man who’s better with his wand than both of us combined-”

“-but first, we need to see what’s going on.” 

“Yes.” Lily tilts her head and appraises him closely. “Go to Harry. Take him home. You’re shaking, Jimmy.”

James’ eyes narrow. “You’re not much better off.”

“I’m not the one who called down lightning this morning,” says Lily. “You know that only covens used to do that, right? Weather witchery always takes covens, because it’s so exhausting. And you just- did it. By yourself.”

“Thor helped,” he says dryly.

Lily sighs. “That isn’t the point.”

“I’m a pureblood.”

“And you’re faster than me with your wand,” agrees Lily. “Listen- you levitate this cup, and I’ll let you go, Jimmy. Go on.”

James closes his eyes. “Lily.”

But his hands don’t move towards his wand. 

“Apparate home,” she says gently. “Spend time with Harry. Rest. I’ll come back with the news.”

“The last time I let you come to Diagon alone, you fought-” he drops his voice, so he’s mouthing the last bit: “-and killed Bellatrix Lestrange.”

Lily feels sick, and free, and exhausted like she’s never felt before. Her hand shakes, but her grip is sure. Give her a target, and she’ll blow out the bullseye without pause.

“I survived,” she says, before pushing her teacup back and rising to her feet. “And it won’t get that far again. The door’s that way, Jimmy.” She tilts her head towards the door leading out to muggle London, and after a long moment- when James nods in one abrupt, irritable jerk of his head- Lily moves towards the door that leads further into Diagon.

In a small corner, she disillusions herself, then spends a dozen minutes transfiguring and charming her clothes into something better fitting her persona. Dark pants, for freedom of movement; a similarly dark form-fitting tunic that splits apart at the hips for the same purpose; boots with sensible soles and a cloak that she charms with a nifty spell that keeps it from tangling with her limbs. Her hair’s already thick and tangled, so she only brushes it and

Then, still disillusioned, Lily steps out.

The paperboy that delivers the  _Prophet_ to the rest of Diagon steps out of Jigger’s Apothecary, and Lily presses her wand to the soft skin of his neck. 

“Step into the alley,” she breathes.

He goes rigid. But he does; it’s shadowed and empty, and Lily cancels the disillusionment at the same time as she shoves him away from her. When he turns back, she’s haloed by the brightness of the sun outside of the alley, and cloaked in darkness otherwise.

“Who’re you, then?” he demands.

Lily flicks her wand to the side. The boy flinches when the rock explodes beside his head- he scrambles all the way to the other side of the alley- before he sees what Lily’d done.

A silver theta, crossed through the middle with a jagged lightning bolt.

“Thanatos,” he whispers.

“Yes,” says Lily. 

“You killed Lestrange.”

“Not enough of them, clearly.” Lily eyes him. “I need help.”

The boy’s fingers dig into the dust. Slowly, he levers himself upright. He’s a slender person; tall and lean, and the result makes him look like he’s been stretched a little, pulled too thin like taffy. His hair’s a colorless sort, all washed-out, but it’s dyed at the tips with purple and electric blue. They make his eyes- a very pale green- stand out.

“I’m not helping you hurt anyone,” he says.

“There was a boy before you,” Lily says slowly. “The Diagon Alley Runner, they called him. It worked out because the shops all pitched in on his coin, and none of them needed to pay for a  _Prophet_ subscription. His name was...”

The boy swallows.

“Brian,” says Lily. “That was his name. What happened to him?”

The boy shakes his head. “I don’t- I don’t know anyone by that name.”

Lily feels anger balloon in her chest. She’d known Brian, not well, perhaps, but- they’d been friends, of a sort, and he’d always had a smile that lit up Diagon even brighter than it was. He’d been a muggleborn. For three years, Brian had run around Diagon, delivering papers with cheerful abandon, and the day there was a headline screaming  _Ministry of Magic in Shambles_ and a Malfoy and Lestrange in the papers, he was gone.

A fucking  _muggleborn._

“You started working this morning,” she whispers, voice shaking, her wand untrembling. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Get up,” snarls Lily, jabbing her wand at him, barely stopping herself from throwing sparks in his eyes. “Get  _up._ Where’s your backlog of papers?”

“There’s-” he pauses, thinking, before flinching again as Lily’s wand starts spitting sparks again. “-a warehouse? We keep old papers there.”

“Take me there.”

“The past month,” she says when they arrive, crisply, coldly, like wind-whittled ice. “All of the papers, one from each day. Bring them out to me.”

He does. Lily follows him where he goes, and when he’s reached this morning’s- he pauses.

His hands tighten on the last packet, knuckles blanching, before he says, quietly, “My mam’s in the Ministry.”

Lily lifts her wand, but he continues talking without turning.

“My dad’s on the run,” he says, almost soundlessly, and Lily lets her wand lower just a little. “The  _Prophet_ doesn’t know that, though. They know I’m a halfblood, and forget all ‘bout the other half.” He turns around, suddenly, and his eyes are bright, like a glowing, eerie lamp. “They’d kill him if they get a chance.”

“I-”

He shoves the bundle at her and steps away. “You come near me again and I’ll go to the aurors.”

“They’ll kill him, but you won’t help me?” demands Lily.

“My  _mam’s_ in the Ministry,” he says again, firmly, loudly. 

 _Oh,_ thinks Lily, watching his long, ungainly limbs.  _Oh, you poor boy._

“Do you need help?”

He clenches his jaw. “No.”

“There’s no shame in it if-”

“Thanatos, right?” he asks. “I don’t need help from someone called death. This ain’t my fight.”

“They have your  _father_ running away,”Lily exclaims. “They have your mother working besides the men hunting him down, and-” 

How many times has she heard that-  _this isn’t my fight, this isn’t my battle, if I close my eyes I won’t have to see my friends and family die-_

“Not your fight?” she demands. “Not your fight? This  _is_ your fight, like nothing else.”

“’m a halfblood.”

Lily scoffs. Rage thrums in her breast like a second heartbeat, hot and fierce. 

“Voldemort will come for the mudbloods first, yes,” she says. “He’ll go for the muggles, too. Then he’ll attack anyone who dared to stand against him, and then he’ll kill everyone who didn’t kneel to him- but do you know what he’ll do after that?”

The boy stares at her.

“He won’t hesitate to kill you,” Lily tells him. “And there won’t be a single person in this world who’ll stand up for you then, because all that will be left are the cowards.”

He turns away, then back to her- and he’s smiling, humorlessly, like a skull stripped of skin. “You were a Gryffindor,” he says, as if it’s a grand joke. “Weren’t you?”

“Yes,” says Lily cautiously.

“Lady,” says the boy, leaning forwards, “coward ain’t the worst insult you can call someone.”

Lily hisses out through her teeth before she can stop herself.

“Call it what you want,” he says, stepping away. “You come after me again, and I’ll show you how quick I can be with my wand.”

“I killed Bellatrix Lestrange,” Lily calls after him. “You think you’re faster than her?”

He doesn’t turn around, though he stops moving. “Doesn’t take speed to kill people. Just luck.” Then his shoulders drop just a little. “Lady Thanatos,” he says, quietly, head arching to meet Lily’s eyes. He looks older, then- exhausted, worn, but steady. The bright tips of his hair catch the late afternoon sunlight. “I won’t leave this place. But that- well, I mean to say- it doesn’t mean I don’t want my father back.”

“I don’t understand.”

His lips tip up. “Give ‘em hell,” he says, and steps out of the door.

Lily watches him leave-  _I don’t know your name,_ she thinks, a quizzical sort of sadness in her chest, before she apparates away. There’s no time for thoughts on people who don’t care about the future of their world in her life, not now. There’s far more important things that she has to face.

...

Lily spreads the papers on the damp floor of the cave carefully. 

They take alternating papers and sort through the articles as quickly as they can. After this, they need to research the ring; James isn’t sure how, exactly, Lily plans to do that- but she’s better than him at the esoteric magics, and he’s not shy about admitting it. But he can manage this easily enough. It’s just skimming over cruel words that make his gorge rise; it’s watching Harry out of the corner of his eye and thanking everything he knows that his son is safe, so near to him.

 Then James feels his heart stutter to a stop. “Lily,” he says, strangled.

She jerks her head up. 

He tosses the paper over to her. 

Lily’s eyes narrow as she skims the page. James can identify the exact moment that she reaches the pertinent article- her face drains of all color. He thinks her hands are shaking.

“James,” she whispers, not looking away from it.

He closes his eyes. James knows what it says; it’s imprinted itself on the insides of his eyeballs.

_Death Eater Captured!_

_Early this morning, the auror department arrested Sirius Black (Figure 11) on charges of high treason, murder, and aiding and abetting the terrorist organization known as the Death Eaters. According to Head Auror Scrimgeour, there is “incontrovertible evidence” of Black’s crimes._  
_“Due to extenuating circumstances,” said Scrimgeour, “Black has been directly transported to Azkaban, where he will remain in the maximum security cells.”_  
 _Scrimgeour went on to stress that this arrest is a triumph for the department. The aurors are making progress in derailing the terrorist activities of the Death Eaters, and witches and wizards have no need to fear for their safety._  
 _However, until his high-profile arrest, Black had been well on his way to a distinguished career in the auror department. These are likely the extenuating circumstances that Auror Scrimgeour spoke of: the auror department is mandated by law to keep citizens accused of high treason in the Ministry of Magic’s cells for a period of 72 hours under which the accused can either prove their innocence or be remanded to Azkaban for a longer trial period. To eliminate security concerns arising from Black’s intimate knowledge of auror protocols, he was taken to Azkaban directly, where he is now under the purview of dementors._

 _Azkaban_ is such a dark and terrifying word, the very spikes of the letters piercing through James’ skin, regret dripping across the cave floor under him, soaking into the stone.

“Jimmy,” says Lily, again, and when he looks up at her, there are tears in her eyes.

“We have to get him,” says James, in a voice he scarcely recognizes.

Lily swallows. “Of course.”

“Bloody-” he grinds his fist into his thigh and forces himself to still. Harry’s there, right next to Lily, playing idly with the seaweed net that Lily’d woven a few weeks ago. Instead, he slumps back. “We should’ve thought about it.”

“We didn’t tell anyone,” Lily agrees. “They all thought Sirius was our Secret-Keeper.” She exhales, slowly. “If I get my hands on Peter-” she shakes her head. “He’ll be lucky to die.”

James doesn’t move his head.

He doesn’t know what he’ll do, if Peter ever shows up. If Peter is standing in front of Lily, she’ll curse him until his skin is inside out, he knows; but if Peter was standing in front of James- James doesn’t know how he’ll raise his wand. James doesn’t know how he’ll cast spells at a man he’s known for nearly half of his life. James doesn’t know if he can look into Peter’s eyes and muster the hate.

He  _knows_ Peter, that’s the problem. He loves Peter, deep as he’s ever loved Sirius or Remus- they’re his brothers. They’re his brothers, and that’s the end of the story.

Sirius would never have raised his wand to Regulus, no matter how much they hated each other.

James doesn’t know how he could ever hope to do any different to Peter.

 _(Anger is different from hatred,_  James thinks, even as he doesn’t look at Lily where she’s weeping silently. He is angry at Peter, perhaps will be for the rest of his life- but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to hate the man. A _h, Peter, I don’t know where we went wrong.)_

Then he reaches for Lily’s hands and draws her to her feet.

“We sleep tonight,” he says, curling his hands over her cheeks, cradling that lovely, loving face in his palms. “We rest. And as soon as we can, we’ll take him from there.”

“Break into Azkaban?” asks Lily, disbelieving. “There’s things that even we can’t do.”

“It’s... difficult,” agrees James. “But do you know of anyone else who’s survived Voldemort more than thrice? Lily- we don’t have a choice. Sirius isn’t- we can’t- we have to save him. We  _have_ to.”

Lily’s hands reach up to clutch at his forearms. “Jimmy,” she whispers.

James kisses her. Long and slow. She tastes like honey, like summer; amidst the biting wind outside, James can feel home in her warmth.

“We  _have_ to,” he whispers into her ear, and watches Lily slowly rock forwards, press her face into his chest.

Then Lily pulls away. She steps towards Harry and swoops him up, pecking at his forehead. Slowly, she turns back to James.

“Harry can’t stay with us if we do,” she says. “It’ll take too long- what, two days? Three?- we’ll need to keep him with someone safe, then.”

James leans against the side of the cave. The rough stone is cold against his shirt. He thinks on it- Remus is in hiding with the werewolves; Sirius is in prison; Peter’s betrayed them. Of Lily’s friends: Marlene is dead, Mary left for foreign shores as soon as she graduated, and hasn’t been seen since. There isn’t anyone else that they can trust with Harry.

“Who, though?” he asks.

Lily traces Harry’s hair, then conjures a glittery phoenix out of her wand that flies around his head. He looks enchanted by it, and Lily rises to her feet slowly, looking like her limbs are aching, like she’s more than thrice her actual age.

“I know someone,” she says, hesitantly. 

James frowns at her. Lily looks up at him, glass-green eyes like all those shattered, shining pieces he’s seen out of pubs, drinking glasses and bottles crushed under his heel in the gutter. The phoenix soars above them, glittering golden and scarlet as it spirals upwards to the ceiling.

“You’re not going to like it,” says Lily.

The phoenix explodes.

“Do you trust me?”

Red sparks fall on their skin, catch on Harry’s dark hair, shine from the depths of Lily’s thick hair. She looks like a siren, like an ancient priestess. She looks like his wife.

“Always,” says James. “Forever.”

...

In one world, Petunia Dursley opens the door on a cold November morning to a letter that explained of her sister’s death.

In one world, it was accompanied by a small, scarred boy. In another, it wasn’t.

...

“May I come in?” Lily asks quietly.

Petunia glares at her. “No,” she snaps. “I don’t want you here.”

“Petu-” _  
_

“You’ve the nerve to come here after what you did?” Petunia demands, voice growing shriller. “You try to- to- to  _infect_ my son with your witchiness, and now you come here? Get out, I say! Out!”

“I’m not in yet,” says Lily levelly. Petunia flushes angrily, but Lily only lifts her chin to meet her anger. “‘Tuney, I’ve no idea what magic you’re speaking of. I haven’t spoken to you in-”

In nearly a year.

Since their parents died.

“-a while,” finishes Lily lamely.

Petunia flushes as if she knows what Lily’s thinking of. Her chin goes up, in a move that Lily recognizes as her own, as a thing that comes directly from their father- but then she steps aside from the door, eyes sweeping over the rest of the street.

“Well, come in then,” she says impatiently. “No use dawdling on the street.”

“It’s a lovely neighborhood,” says Lily, pressing her hands together to keep from wringing them. She feels distinctly helpless, in this white kitchen and its smooth linoleum tiles and polished appliances; Lily’s world is made of wood and stone and blood, and this modernity is as far as one can come from that. “Very expensive.”

“Vernon and I moved in when I realized I was pregnant,” says Petunia, before turning and arching a disapproving brow. “There’s a primary school right down the street- the best in the county. And there’s a lot of families with children around Dudley’s age. Where are you living now, Lily? Some mansion, like your husband spent all of my wedding dinner expounding on owning?”

Lily thinks of the chilly, damp cave that she and James have been living in for the past month, and can’t resist a wry smile. “No,” she says. “Definitely nothing like that.”

“So your husband’s a liar as well as an imbecile.”

“’Tuney-”

 _“Don’t_ call me that,” flares Petunia, before smoothing her hands over her skirt. “No, Lily, you tell me how fair it was of him to spend our wedding dinner- the wedding that Vernon paid for out of his own pocket!- in homage to himself and his- his  _stupid_ friends, and all the money that his father and father’s father had passed down to him! As if Vernon hasn’t been working himself to the bone for his entire life! As if being given things is better than working for them! And then his friend-  _your_ friend, Lily- had the gall to call Vernon a leech!” 

“I’m sorry,” says Lily quietly.

Petunia eyes her. She breathes deep and lets the angry flush fade from her cheeks. “Why are you here?”

“Because- well, you know of the war, don’t you?”

“The war that killed our parents.” 

“Yes,” says Lily. “Well- the leader of the terrorist group- he came for us. For me and James. A month ago.”

There’s a long silence. If Lily’d expected Petunia to gasp or ask after her health, Lily would’ve been sorely disappointed. But their relationship had soured long before such expectations could have arisen.

“Clearly you’re alright,” says Petunia.

Lily inclines her head. “It was close, though.”

“Lily-”

“One of James’ friends betrayed us. That’s how he knew where to come.”

“The one with black hair?” asks Petunia, lips twisting.

“The- the short one,” replies Lily. “And he framed Sirius. Which is why I’m here, actually.” She firms her shoulders.  _Don’t flinch now, Lily._ “I need your help.”

Petunia’s eyes narrow suspiciously. “Help?”

“It’ll take three days- at least- to rescue Sirius. We can’t have Harry with us then. It’ll be so dangerous, ‘Tun- Petunia. Dueling, spells being thrown all over- he needs to be kept somewhere safe.”

Petunia doesn’t answer for a long minute. Then she whirls around and strides into the living room, Lily chasing on her heels, where she scoops up a chubby little boy with her stick-straight hair; she whispers into his ear and juggles him through a tiny tantrum before setting him down once more.

“I told you we don’t hold with your-  _kind_ in our house,” she announces coldly. “You haven’t respected that ever before, so why would you do so now?”

It sounds like a rhetorical question, but Lily answers anyway.

“I’ve stayed away since you sent that letter last year,” she says. “Petunia- I haven’t sent anything, I haven’t  _spoken_ to you in-”

“-you sent a letter!” exclaims Petunia. “It was just there, under my milk one morning, and you had it magicked to follow me wherever I went! Don’t deny it, I know what your magic looks like! It spat glitter all over me when I tried to ignore it!” She sweeps a hand over her collarbone, shaking. “It was terrifying.”

“And I’m sorry for that,” says Lily, before stepping forwards and taking Petunia’s narrow palm in her own. “But I didn’t send that letter. Did you read it?”

“No.” Petunia hesitates. “I burned it.”

Lily snorts, imagining the glittery letter and Petunia’s desperate attempts to burn it before it could be seen by her neighbors. There’s only one person who would have sent that kind of a letter, though. In fact, there’s only one person who would even know to send it to Petunia.

“Then it was probably Dumbledore,” she says. “He probably sent it to you to say- well- that I was dead.”

Petunia goes white. “What?”

“I told you that the leader of the terrorist group came for me and James,” says Lily. “We survived, but- it was so close, Petunia. James was hurt so badly. And I had to heal him, I had to care for Harry, I had to make sure nobody else was following us- the safest thing was to let everyone think we were dead.”

“Have you lost your mind?” Petunia demands loudly. 

Her eyes are their mother’s eyes. Blue-grey, like the froth of an ocean’s waves. Lily fights not to recoil at the brightness in them; at the fear, and shock, all melding into something that looks a lot like anger. Of all the people she’s known, Lily’s lost the most: her mother, her father, everyone she was close to in Hogwarts. James and his friends don’t understand- they’ve been risking their lives for so long, they’ve forgotten how it feels to not throw themselves into danger at the first provocation.

It’s been so long since she’s had someone look at her with rage for risking her life, rather than pride.

“No,” she murmurs.

Petunia shakes her head. “You’ve a son,” she hisses. “How selfish can you be, Lily? You’re still fighting, after everything you’ve lost?  _Why?”_

“Because I can’t run,” replies Lily, wearily. “He’ll follow us wherever we go.”

And  _god,_ isn’t that frightening? There’s nowhere in this world that will keep Lily’s son safe from Voldemort. If they flee to France, further- dark magic is strong there, stronger by far than Britain, and even worse: no nation in the world will harbor refugees fleeing from a Dark Lord. If the government finds out that Lily’s family might begin a war in their lands, they won’t hesitate to deport them.

The best defense for Harry is for Voldemort to think he’s dead.

“Will you help me?” she asks instead of explaining further, turning to meet Petunia’s gaze. “I know how horrible we were to each other, Petunia. I know- I know our history. But a terrible mistake’s been made, and an innocent man is in prison, suffering things he should never have to, and the only people who can save him are me and my husband. Will you help me?”

Petunia closes her eyes. She wavers, thin and tall, like the girl from Diagon; like the boy Lily’d met this morning. 

Then she opens them.

“This prison,” she says, licking her lips, “is it- that one- Azkaban? The one with the... dementors?”

Lily pauses. Petunia couldn’t have ever heard that name more than twice; Lily’s shied away from discussing it in front of their parents. The only person in Lily’s life who would have ever spoken of such things is Severus, and she hasn’t spoken to him in nearly seven years.

She thinks of Petunia, small, smart, shoved out of the limelight by Lily; Lily’d looked like their mother’s youngest sister reborn, a woman who’d died from an unlucky riptide almost before she could walk, and their mother had always been more loving of Lily, kinder to her, than ever to Petunia. Lily thinks of how close they’d been, despite all those little things that must have hurt Petunia. She thinks of their childhood, and all those things that had made Lily stand out in a world that had only ever punished Petunia for attempting the same. 

She thinks of Petunia trying to grasp those slippery, shining syllables that encompass magic, quietly, desperately, slowly turning to hate to keep jealousy at bay.

“Yes,” says Lily, careful to keep her voice unpitying.

Petunia’s jaw works, slowly, like she’s testing out the words and biting them back even before they can reach her lips.

She doesn’t look at Lily- her eyes are focused on her son, and there’s some conflict raging in them- and after a long, breathless pause, she says, deathly quiet, “Very well.”

“What?” Lily can’t help asking.

“I said very well,” says Petunia, lifting her eyes to meet Lily’s. She doesn’t look away now. It’s bravery, Lily thinks; not a kind that anyone else would have recognized, but real, extant, and as hard as anything Lily’s ever done. “Bring your son here.”

“Thank you,” says Lily softly.

Petunia’s eyes harden. “Nobody deserves to be locked in a place with soul-eaters.” She swallows. “I never liked that boy- but- Lord, Lily, there’s things that I wouldn’t ever wish on a person.”

The last time she met Sirius, he’d charmed Petunia’s hat into a frog and cursed Vernon to have a raincloud following him over all of their honeymoon.

Lily steps forwards and before she can overthink it, she hugs Petunia.

But Petunia shoves her away. 

When Lily looks up at her, hurt, Petunia’s trembling, white-faced with her anger. “Don’t you dare act like we’re on equal terms,” she bites out. “This is- this is what a normal family does, when asked to, when given this choice- but that doesn’t mean that I’ve forgiven you of anything. You’re a selfish, privileged little girl who’s never had to grow up with the fears everyone else has. So send your son to me.” She seems to coil in on herself, abruptly embittered and sour as an unripe lemon. “Maybe I can teach him to be kind.”

“Why do you  _hate_ me?” cries Lily, throwing up her arms. 

Every time she thinks they’ve bridged something- every time she even hopes- Petunia changes the game, she steps back, she goes cold and cruel as Severus fucking Snape. Lily hates it. 

“Oh, as if you’ve not given me enough excuses,” sneers Petunia. 

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Where were you when I buried our parents?” shouts Petunia, advancing on Lily, using her height to crowd her backwards. “I sent you letter after letter, Lily, and you didn’t come! I delayed for a  _fortnight_ before I realized you weren’t coming!” There are tears in her eyes, those terrible eyes that look like their mother’s. “I  _needed_ you,” she whispers. “For the only time in my life, I needed my sister there for me, and you weren’t there. You couldn’t even give me the courtesy of an answer.”

 _Oh,_ thinks Lily, and her heart twists in her chest like someone’s taken it and squeezed it.  _Oh, ‘Tuney, I never meant this._

“I did send you one,” says Lily quietly.

Petunia’s eyes flash. “One. And it ignored everything about the funeral- it was like you hadn’t even  _heard-”_

“I’d heard.”

“Then why?”

“Because they went after our parents because of me,” says Lily. “You know that. They killed our parents and they would’ve killed you, too, if they could’ve gotten their hands on you. And I had to make sure that wouldn’t happen.”

Petunia sits down, hard, on the armchair behind her. “That was a possibility?”

“Petunia.” Lily stares at her. “It’s a  _war._ Of course it was a possibility. These people- they’re such- I tried to hide it from all of you. The ugliness of magic. But it’s- there’s people there who hate people like me, who hate people who aren’t born into magical families. They’ve gained power. Too much.”

“And you couldn’t tell me that, of course,” says Petunia. She’s trying for her usual disdain, but she looks utterly unnerved; her voice wobbles just enough for Lily to try to soften hers. “You couldn’t come here, and explain things to me.”

“I spent the weeks after they died developing a ritual,” Lily says, before kneeling and taking one of Dudley’s red colored blocks, running her fingers over the smooth wood. “I made sure they couldn’t track you through my blood.”

Petunia licks her lips. “How?”

She hesitates. “By cleaving myself from the name Evans.” Petunia’s head snaps up, and Lily clarifies, sadly: “I’m no longer Lily Evans, ‘Tuney. Not Lily Evans Potter either. I’m Lily Potter.”

If she and James ever separate, then Lily won’t be anything. Just Lily, red-haired, bright-eyed, quick-tongued Lily. She’ll have her wand and her mind and her anger, and not a single thing more.

It isn’t a sacrifice she regrets.

Lily watches Petunia for a long minute, then she reaches over and pats Dudley on his head- and then she rises to her feet. It aches in her bones. But Harry will be safe here, Lily knows, between wide windows and clean sofas and soft carpets. So she nods to Petunia and heads towards the door.

“Lily,” calls Petunia, and she stills. “That letter- those flowers you kept prattling about- was that a code?”

“Yes,” says Lily.

“Whose?”

“Whose do you think?”

(Their mother’s. Long, sunny afternoons filled with their mother showing them pictures of coastal blossoms and describing another language. They’d eaten oat cookies that tasted like salt and sand, and their mother had whispered long, liquid syllables of a language that their father hated- he’d never learned Welsh, had even forbidden it from their household, and their mother had accepted that to his face.

When he napped, though, she took her girls out to the back and gave them cookies she’d learned from her mother, and taught them, slowly, patiently, two languages: one of her hometown, and another of flowers.

The last time she’d done so had been before Lily went to Hogwarts.)

“You remember that?” asks Petunia.

“I’ve never forgotten,” says Lily. 

She turns, and Petunia’s closer to her than she’d thought- close enough to touch, though neither of them does.

“I’ve never forgotten,” Lily murmurs, and Petunia nods, once, face pale and narrow in the kitchen sunlight- she’s not pretty like Lily, not with life bursting out of her, but rather like a piece of cut glass- hard, harsh, tempered and forged and shining. They’ve hated each other for so long. For too long. “I’m sorry for letting you think otherwise.”

“As,” says Petunia, slowly, lifting her chin, eyes glittering, the last Evans in all the world, “am I.”

...

In one world, Petunia welcomes a boy into her home in November.

In another, she welcomes the same boy into her home in December.

(In one world, Petunia welcomes a boy into her home. In another, she welcomes him into her heart.)

...

They’re ready: James- as an auror- has patrolled Azkaban; he knows the way its security works. One day to map the terrain and decide their route, Lily thinks, and to test the wards from the island’s edges, where the wards are faltering, and then- then, they can break into it.

Lily hefts her bags higher onto her back, and sees something stick to the rough cloth- she peels it off, revealing a damp, smeared piece of the  _Prophet_ that she’d clipped out and forgotten in the rush to save Sirius.

Irene is there, written into immortality on one of the papers: defiant, angry, vicious.  _This world isn’t safe. And the only way to make it safer is to make sure it’s safer ourselves._ Lily reads the words, traces over them, and she feels the sadness in her chest battle with pride, feels the sadness surrender.

 _I said this._ Her fingers are stained black with ink.  _I touched another’s life, and she remembered that._

There had been blood on Lily’s hands that day. She’d touched Irene’s shirt, and she’d stained it red, and Irene hadn’t flinched away. Just a few days earlier, Lily’d hated her sister. This morning, she’d handed her son over to him, and shed only shed a few tears in the process. Days before that, Lily met a boy, years older than Irene, a coward and a prideful one at that- a boy who’d been swallowed by the war far earlier than Irene ever had been; a boy who hadn’t raised a single wand to the dark side, who refused to do so.

 _Courage, dear heart._ It’s an old saying. Lily remembers the words, surging up from the black waters of her childhood; reading books on her kitchen counter, amidst the smell of egg and pungent thyme, sunlight leavening her hair and warming her shoulders.  _There is something brighter than this._

She hadn’t known courage then. She hadn’t known all the forms courage could take, hadn’t even dreamt them.

Now, she looks up at James, as he enters the cave, ready to do the impossible, and the tears in her eyes fall when she sees the familiar, blocky edges of his hair. 

“Lils?” asks James, startled.

She shakes her head, not trusting her voice. Lily swallows, then reaches up and presses her fingers to his narrow, sharp jaw, spreading shadowy ink over his stubble.

“Let’s give ‘em hell,” she whispers.

...

They land on a stony shore.

James transfigures a boat out of the smooth rock, and Lily charms it to head towards Azkaban. Once at the edge of the wards, Lily runs the quick tests, wand flashing over the choppy waters with bursts of brilliant light.

“They’ll allow you in,” she says finally. “With verification.”

“Then it isn’t an issue.”

 _“James,”_ says Lily. “You don’t have your wand, have you forgotten that?”

He narrows his eyes back at her. “Bobby Crick had a memory for shit.”

“Azkaban’s warden?”

James nods easily. “Kept forgetting his wand inside the sealed room. So Scrimgeour changed the wards, from wands to magic. And there’s no way they’ll have stricken me from the stones, not with the whole restructuring of the Ministry. If they’ve even figured it out in the first place.”

“If you’re wrong, Jimmy,” warns Lily.

But this is James at his worst- or his best, because Merlin knows his luck’s held out thus far- because his friend is in danger, and half the reason his friend’s in danger is because of James, so there won’t be any reasoning with him on safety.

“I’m not,” he says firmly, and that’s that.

...

The next morning, they return. And James’ luck holds: they enter the wards without any problems. Lily keeps herself tucked in the shadows of her cloak, motionless, as they move further towards the dark fortress.

It’s like a parody of heading to Hogwarts. Here, the boat is cold, the waves are rough and chilling, the fortress is lit by sparse torches that aren’t helpful even in the light of day.

“Come on, love,” murmurs James, as they dock. His eyes- so bright, always- are shining with something too hot to call excitement. Bloodlust, perhaps. This is what the Britons of old had faced against Viking raiders, thinks Lily. This is what the Romans had faced, when battling the druids. Lily’s so glad she’s not on the opposite side. “Ready?”

Lily lifts her wand and tilts her head at him. “Always,” she returns.

...

The bottom levels of Azkaban are devoid of dementors.

It’s where petty criminals are kept, as well as those who are still waiting for their trials. The dementors’ miasma permeates even this floor, despite them not being allowed here, and it’s that which holds the prisoners locked inside, not the guards, who’re just three aurors, all of them who spend their miserable shifts in the guardsroom that’s really nothing more than a glorified dungeon.

James walks back into the prison.

He doesn’t shiver; he’s well past such easy, uncomplicated motions. Even in the dank, dark blackness, the world feels hot and bright and sharp enough to slice. Slowly, silently, James heads towards the guardroom.

Years and years ago, the first time he watched Remus transform- the world had been so bright that night, the moon silvering everything in sight; James’ flank had been ruined, a mess of shredded blood and bone, to the point that he hadn’t been able to walk- James had watched the sky lighten, had watched Remus’ shame, his horror, and he hadn’t repented for any of it. He hadn’t been able to breathe without choking on the blood. For weeks after, his teeth were stained red, the insides of his cheeks raw from chewing on it to keep from screaming.

He can’t imagine regretting that.

In this war, James has taken lives, saved lives, blown up buildings and escaped madmen. His hands are stained a red bright as Lily’s hair, as Harry’s mouth, as Remus’ tired eyes and Sirius’ jackets and Peter’s delicate, carefully tended roses. 

He doesn’t regret it.

James slashes his wand down, once, words surging over his tongue, slippery and harsh, and the door to the guardroom explodes as if it’s never existed in the first place.

Spellfire erupts from his wand, scalding and brilliant. The three aurors within don’t stand a chance: James is the best in the division, in the Order, and he’s got rage and surprise both on his side. A breath later, Lily sweeps in after him. She waves her wand and sinks into the glittering strings that represent wards. She’s searching for Sirius, whose magic she can probably feel with those runes she’s carved into her skin. 

Suddenly, Lily hisses out through her teeth, like she’s been slapped across the face, and her fingers move even faster, flicking the strings with a fervor that makes James’ spine itch. Then she looks at him.

Her eyes are dark.

Black, like the sea around them.

James lifts his wand immediately.  _“Lily.”_

“It’s me, Jimmy,” she says, but it’s strained, as if coming from a great distance or after a great feat. It does nothing to reassure him. “It’s me. But- there’s a thing that I can do with these wards- it’s like a loophole. Stupid of them. It’ll take- give me a minute.”

“We don’t have much time.” 

“I  _know,”_ she snaps, but her eyes are reflecting the light of her wards, unearthly and ugly; James doesn’t care what she says, he wants to reach forwards and catch her pale, lovely hands, drag her to him, ground her to the earth with the weight of him. But he trusts Lily, too, would trust her even if she gives him a sword and asks him to gut himself, would trust her so long as he knows her to be in her own mind. So he stays silent.

When she finally lets the wards fade, the blackness has faded from her eyes. Her pupils look a little larger than usual, but that could just as easily be the darkness around them.

“I have Azkaban,” whispers Lily, before raising her chin to the ceiling, eyes shutting dreamily. “Come. I know where Sirius is.”

James follows, slowly, warily. But Lily does seem to know where she’s going- they head upstairs, towards the maximum security portion of Azkaban; and, perhaps, Azkaban is indeed responding to her, because they don’t even encounter any dementors along the way.

“Two more flights,” she murmurs, at one point. 

 _This,_ thinks James, wand held too tight in his left hand, fear and anger a hot ball in the pit of his stomach, lungs a little too small for the rest of his body,  _is too easy._

And just as he has the thought, Lily’s body seizes up. She doesn’t collapse. Rather, she goes rigid as a board, and when James leaps forwards, he sees blood trickling down her nose, vivid against her skin. Lily opens her eyes.

They’re black again, and James has to fight not to recoil.

“You didn’t kill them,” she says. 

“Kill who?”

“The guards.”

James shakes his head. “No, I did. I definitely-”

“One of them just alerted the Ministry!” Lily says, voice pitching higher, almost into hysterics. “I need- give me a- a minute.” 

Even as he supports her body, she flicks open the ward schema- it shouldn’t be accessible outside of the guardroom, but Lily’d mentioned something about a loophole, hadn’t she?- and starts tangling the strings together with a speed that looks like madness. 

But the walls ice over; James can feel the chill in his bones as the dementors approach. Whatever Lily’d done to keep them away must have failed. It’s clear to him, even as he watches her worriedly: she’s faltering.

James jumps as the door at the far end of the hall starts rattling. He swears under his breath, then shifts away from Lily carefully- she keeps to her feet easily, doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s not behind her- so he turns to face the door. 

The hall goes darker, if possible, and James sees three dementors surge through the door. The only illumination comes from Lily’s ward schema, and even that is a flickering, pale shade of what’s necessary.

He thinks of Harry, warm and small in his arms, a tiny, black-capped bundle that hadn’t even been as long as his forearms, and shouts,  _“Expecto Patronum!”_ and-

And-

And Prongs doesn’t leap from his wand.

A silver shield forms instead.

James is driven backwards one step, two, three. He sets his shoulders and shoves forwards, gasping. But the dementors approach, unconcerned by the flickering, fading shield between them.

He sinks to his knees. Sweat drips down his back. James inhales, exhales, inhales- and he breathes in freezing, terrifying despair along with precious air.

It reminds him of the peppermint leaves off the Orkney coast; that’s where Potter Manor’s been, for the history of their family, and it’s where they’re all buried, his blood. In fields of peppermint, where the wind bites through one’s cheeks and the entire world is colorless and the sea and stone and salt all comes together in cold, icy wrath. When his father died, he’d clutched James’ palms in his dry, fevered hands and choked on the word  _peppermint._

James lifts his head, shaking, and bites down on his tongue, blood red and rich in his mouth as his shield winks out.

He’s never been good at the Patronus spell. It’s such a stupid thing to fail at; here lies James Potter, who survived Voldemort but couldn’t survive his own despair.

There’s no light. The black sluices over his head, starless and dark as Lily’s eyes. James can’t breathe. This will be how he dies: swallowed by his wife’s darkness, by all the things they’ve sacrificed along the way. 

The dementor reaches down and grips James’ chin and there’s nothing left in him.

It leans down. 

James doesn’t close his eyes. Even terrified, even cold down to his bones and despair a living, clawing beast in his chest, he won’t die blind.

There’s a rattling, slow inhale.

 _Lily..._ he thinks. He can’t tell her that he loves her. But she’s the last thought he’ll ever have: his wife, lovely, beautiful, wonderful wife.  _Lily._

And something brilliant, brighter than a thousand stars, explodes out from behind James.

He sprawls, ungainly, on the floor. When he gains the strength to move his head up, he sees Lily standing, wand outstretched, blood dark and dripping down her face. She’s staring at something, face white and eyes wide. But James doesn’t have the energy to turn, to see, so he looks at her instead. He stares at her until he can see her eyes, pale and green and clear as spring vines chasing away winter’s ice.

Relief clutches at his heart.

Slowly, aching, he rolls over. 

The first time Lily cast her Patronus had been the first time they’d defied Voldemort. James remembers it well: Benjy Fenwick’s corpse beside him, the yawing hole in his heart that he hadn’t realized came with dementors. The sun had turned shadowed. Just that morning, he’d showed Lily his animagus form; they’d laughed, and drunk tea, and been happy.

James had been so sure he’d die. 

Lily’d done the Patronus instead, a silver doe leaping from her wand to save them. He’d loved her so much in that moment- even now, he doesn’t remember what he’d told Moody, what he’d told McGonagall; all he knows is how they’d fucked just moments later, in the foyer of their home, vicious and hard and bruising and  _good,_ like they couldn’t live without it.

But now, in the icy corridors of Azkaban, glowing and large as any phoenix, is a silver swan.

“Lily?” croaks James.

Slowly, she lets her wand fall; slowly, Lily approaches James, and cards her fingers through his hair. “Up, Jimmy,” she whispers. “C’mon. We don’t have time for this.”

“That’s looks... different.”

“If you don’t get up, I’ll slap you.”

“Lily-”

Something settles over James’ shoulders, warm and stifling. He jerks his head up to look at her, meets her eyes- those lovely, light eyes- and Lily says, quietly, “I’ve put up anti-apparition wards.”

“Okay.” James blinks. “Why?”

“To buy us some time.” She stands and levers James up, too. “We need a distraction. That’s the only way. Get their attention some other way- get them not to pay attention to Azkaban, just to something  _else-”_

“And how’re you planning on doing that?” 

“Thor could fly,” she says. Her eyes are so earnest, so true; it makes James want to shrink away. It’s so fucking terrifying. “Thor could  _fly,_ James. You’ve his axe. I’ll get Sirius, get us both out; but you need to make sure they aren’t looking for us.”

“That’s a big task,” he says slowly.

Lily grins at him. “You’re up to it.”

“Lily-”

“If anyone was born to fly, it was you.” She steps away, towards the stairs leading to the maximum security. “I’ve faith in you, Jimmy.”

 _Is this the last time I see you?_ James wonders it, but he doesn’t reach for her. They’re in a war. They’re the fucking leaders of the war. There’s no room in them for those kind of things now.  _I love you, Lily._

But she knows that.

She needs him to fly, though, to survive. So James- his hands red, his chest cold, his wand steady- 

James will fly.

...

(Here’s a secret that the world doesn’t know: when James first transformed with Remus, when he first saw that painful, terrible, unnatural change- when he shifted back the next morning with a bloodied flank and wounds severe enough to leave him with a limp- James Potter laughed, loud and clear and ringing, because this,  _this,_ was what life was about.)

(Here’s a truth that James hasn’t told anyone: he doesn’t regret standing up to Voldemort, not even when it means he’ll come after Harry. Here’s a burning, terrible secret: James has regretted three things in his life, and none of it makes him a better person.)

...

“Oh, Sirius,” says Lily sadly, when she sees him. 

He’s so thin. He’s gotten so gaunt- his eyes are sunken, dark holes, and his robes are threadbare, patchwork things that hang off his bones. He also doesn’t recognize Lily; he seems to think she’s an apparition.

Lily bundles him out of the cell quickly, carefully.

...

Thor’s axe vibrates in James’ hand, impatiently, and James tries, hard, to breathe through the fear in his gut. The winds around Azkaban buffet his body, try to make him throw himself over. He doesn’t know how to tell them that he’ll be doing it of his own free will in just a moment.

As he clambers onto the stone turret, wand in one hand and axe in the other, struggling for balance, the world narrows to one shining point, glittering like a gem.

 _I’ve faith in you, Jimmy,_ says Lily, warm and loving, right beside him. 

James doesn’t let himself think on failure. 

That’s where the others fell. That’s why Thor’s sons and all the rest were rejected by the axe. Because the axe won’t accept anything less than total faith in it. Absolute trust.

He breathes in, salt and ice chilling his lungs, and steps off of Azkaban’s highest tower.

...

Lily nearly has Sirius out of the castle when she sees an auror limping along. The third one, she thinks, that had been in the guardroom; the one who’d called the Ministry.

 _Fuck,_ she thinks.

Then he sees her, and her world lights up with spellfire.

...

James  _flies._

...

He alights on the shore trembling, quivering, weak as a lamb. He’s never felt so glorious in his life. It’s strange, of sorts, to feel such disparate things together; but James catches himself before he can fall into thoughts.

Now is not the time for reaction.

It’s time for  _action._

Raising the axe, letting it catch all the light, letting it swirl the clouds above him, James thinks of how angry he is. How desperately, furiously, terribly he wants to be  _safe_ once more. How he wants his son to grow up in a world that loves him, and how enraged he is that Harry can’t.

Lightning splits the sky open.    


	3. yes-

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _How afraid he must have been,_ he thinks, and grief curdles in him like a cramped muscle. _My little brother._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> APOLOGIES!! For the late update! Life got in the way, yada yada yada. 
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter include: child abuse (of the emotional/magical/quasi-physical kind, because Blacks R HERE), redemption arcs Like Whoa, and lots of allusion to the casualties of war. The only POVs are the marauders and Lily and YEESH ARE THEY ANGSTY. I promise that next chapter will have more action tho. This one got long enough on its own!
> 
> Poem in the middle comes from Ulysses, of course, by Tennyson. Yes, James is a poetry buff, why are you asking?
> 
> Enjoy!

Peter is cold. So cold. Straight down to his bones, like all the brightness and warmth in the world has been carved out of him. He shudders and looks above him to the cliffs- the brothers Lestrange and the siblings Carrow are watching him on top, and Alecto Carrow is many things, one of which is sadistic and the second of which is in possession of a tremendously unfair ability to aim accurately and precisely at what she wants.

Right now that means Peter, if he doesn’t move fast enough.

The cliffs are sheer, though, and even a rat would find it difficult to find a hold. All that’s keeping him from breaking his neck is a wavering leviosa. 

Slowly, squeaking in the part of him that’s still a rat, that terrified quaking animal that cannot believe he’s actually  _doing_ this- Peter lowers himself.

It’s ridiculous, in all truth. He’d betrayed James to the Dark Lord and ever after, he’s needed to plumb deeper depths of courage than ever before. The Dark Lord doesn’t take kindly to people remaining in his presence after he’s dismissed them. Even if he’s just crucioed you to hell and back. Peter would have said it was impossible to stand up after that particular torture, but he’s seen others do it. He’s done it himself. Falling down a cliff, trying to find Rowle- it isn’t nearly the hardest things Peter’s done in just the past week alone.

Finally,  _finally,_  wrists aching, Peter thumps onto the hard-packed ground. 

He inhales through his teeth, like the opposite of a whistle, at the pain. Then he gets up, muscles protesting. Gives himself a moment’s break to adjust to the new surroundings. 

The North Sea is loud here. The waves break just a little farther away- but before Peter can reach the beach there’s a ward. Slowly, Peter palms his wand and approaches it. Risks a look over his shoulder; the others are so far away that they might as well be simple black dots. Takes a deep breath. The ward’s easy to identify- the delineations, the smell like salt and rotting bone- but Peter doesn’t know what it means. Doesn’t know what it’s supposed to keep out.

 _Or,_ he thinks sharply, heart jumping in his throat,  _what it’s supposed to keep in. If the dementors are rioting-_

Well, if they are, then Peter’s well and truly dead. The Dark Lord’s displeasure on that point would be- something magnificent. Peter breathes out instead of panicking, shivering and drawing his cloak tighter around him in the vain hope it might keep him warmer.

 _I did this so I could survive,_ he reminds himself.  _Everything._

Everything else, Peter can redeem. Forgiveness- of himself, by himself, forget all others- might be a long road; might be an impossible road; but Peter  _has_ it, for so long as he draws breath. The moment that breath is taken from him it will all cease to matter. All the sacrifice. All the death. 

(He’s seen the blood in Godric’s Hollow. He’s seen the destruction. Nobody loses that much blood and lives. And without James, Lily wouldn’t get far. But: the blood. Peter can forget Harry and Lily and the pain woven into their once-beautiful home’s walls. He can’t forget the blood. He cannot forget-)

Head cocked, wand in bloodless fingers, Peter paces the length of the ward. His shoes don’t leave marks in the soil. His back throbs with every movement. 

Then the ward goes sharply inwards, following the natural path of an estuary bracketing the sea. The water’s not very deep as far as Peter can see, but it is cold, and it is fast. He walks forwards, the ward on one side and the rushing water on the other, towards the beach. Something quails inside of him. Something that’s stood before a Dark Lord, tortured and exhausted and unbroken- something that almost withers away now, for some eerie reason.

The first thing that Peter sees when he tops the bluff is Rowle’s body. 

 _Oh, Merlin,_ thinks Peter, horrified. 

Rowle’d been a wild man, prone to a madness that Peter’d only ever seen mirrored in the Blacks. He’d never been a good man but-

But the man in front of him is cleaved in half. The ward had caught him around the middle. The blood is soaked into the sand at his feet; his legs are on the far side, his blank eyes facing up to the sky. Peter stumbles forwards, coming to a halt at the point where Rowle’s corpse lies. The blood-

_James, James, James-_

The hair on Peter’s arm bristles. He looks up and sees something white; something getting closer. The sea churns louder, higher, and Peter scrambles for his wand. Points it at the ball of light. Swallows and doesn’t breathe, even as the light falls and lands, gracefully, at the beach where Peter cannot go because of the ward.

The light fades a little to reveal a slim, dark-haired man. He holds something too large to be a wand in one hand. Otherwise, he wears robes in the cut of aurors, but black instead of their red. He turns, sweeping over the beach for a brief moment, before he lifts the object in his hand to the heavens.

It’s all the warning Peter has before the world explodes.

He’s aware of something screaming- he becomes aware, slowly, that it’s him- and then Peter realizes that his wand’s still in his hand. He looks up. He’s fallen to his knees; the sand is gritty under his knees. The lightning is too bright for him. For a brief moment, Peter feels blind.

But then the light darkens for a brief moment. Even half-blind, Peter would have known that angled face. The withered thing inside of him shrivels further in on itself. All his sins come to roost- all his grief-

Because there, face illuminated from within, brighter than even the sun, stands James Potter.

...

Light streaks the stone near his hands. Pain lashes down his spine. Someone screams, far in the distance, and he is aware of a woman with thick red hair fighting desperately to get to him. But there is a man between them, and he is busy minding the woman’s spells. He’s already ignored the shell that’s slumped against the wall.

 _Pain,_ thinks Sirius, and for the first time in weeks feels something catch in his chest. Something hot, like an ember on the verge of breaking into flames.  _Oh, mate, this is your fucking mistake._

The red-haired woman is being driven backwards. She’s not quite so good at dueling as the man in front of her. But that doesn’t matter; because all it takes is one heartbeat of inattention, and Sirius  _has_ it-

He leaps.

Mid-air, his skin turns to fur. His face elongates. His jaw becomes stronger. His ears become better. The cold lessens. 

And between breaths, Sirius tears out Theodore Nott’s throat.

...

A calling card to all the Death Eaters in the area.

James drops the lightning; it takes more energy than it’s worth, even if he’d been careful to only call it from the already ever-present storms above the North Sea. A flick of his wrist makes the axe disappear. Another, and his wand’s in his hand. 

There’s a shuffling sound behind him, and James snaps his wand around. He’s an auror, at the end of the day, and that training’s embedded into his muscles. The roll of his body out of the way, the punishing angle of his wrist as he aims it blindly at the spot- it’s the work of a moment, all instinct.

But then he  _sees._

 _Fuck,_ thinks James, swallowing hard. Peter’s at the other end of his wand, and he looks like he’s shitting himself. Like he’s scared. Like he’s scared of James.  _Fuck, fuck, fuck-_

“Peter,” he says, because he can’t think of anything else to do. 

“This’s impossible,” whispers Peter. He’s gone deathly white. “Ghosts don’t- you can’t- he  _killed_ you!”

“Who?” asks James, dangerously soft. Something’s thrumming in him, thinking about Lily, about dementors, about a Patronus that no longer brands her as  _his._ “Your master, Pete?”

Peter flinches, whole-bodied. “Don’t- don’t call me that.”

“Would you prefer Wormtail?”

“You’re a ghost,” says Peter, tilting his chin up. There’s something there- some courage- that he hadn’t had before. James wants to snarl at it. “You can’t hurt me-”

James slashes his hand down and, in a flash of something hot and bright, Rowle’s body disappears. Peter quails at it. The cold, vicious hole in James’ belly gnaws a little further. A little deeper. 

“I’m dead, am I?” he asks, hissing. “I can’t hurt you? Oh, I’m so sorry, Peter, to  _disappoint_  you.”

Peter presses himself further into the sand. James advances on him, the sand under his feet turned to glass, crunching under his boots.

“You betrayed us,” he whispers, and there are sparks haloing his vision. Not from his wand; from lightning, summoned, held in check by his will alone. “You betrayed Lily. You gave  _Harry_ up to Voldemort.”

“I know,” says Peter. “I’m so sorry, James, I had-”

 _“Sirius_ paid for your crimes, you fucking bastard!” James shouts, and he is shaking, nearly vibrating. “Do you know what we’ve lost, because of you- because-”

“I didn’t mean-”

“You did! Don’t lie to me! Don’t you dare! You stood in front of him and you fucking told him, and you probably laughed when you did it!”

“If you’re going to kill me,” says Peter abruptly, “I’d want you to do it quickly.”

He doesn’t move this time, but Peter’s eyes meet James’ and hold. That chin lift, that blank face- those are all things that came after he joined the Death Eaters. Those are all parts of him that James doesn’t know. But the way Peter looks at James now, it’s how he’d looked when his father died, their fourth year. 

Fifteen years old and bearing his mother’s weight on his shoulders as she wept over the grave. James doesn’t know why he remembers it, but he does, so well: the misting rain, the sobs, the look in his eyes, like all the despair and loss in the world couldn’t turn him colder than he already was. It’d been the first and only time Peter ever allowed any of them near his blood family. And Mrs. Pettigrew hadn’t ever really recovered, but Peter hadn’t let on, not really. He’d just- continued grinding away, quiet, unnoticed, burdened and colorless until he wasn’t any longer. Those eyes, watery, bulging, ugly.

Level. Everything else about him is quivering; but his eyes remain unflinching.

The other Death Eaters are coming; James can see them descending the cliffs. Surely this is enough time for Lily to escape- even burdened with Sirius. Even as he thinks it, there’s a shift in the wards- something breaking. The anti-apparition ward is still up, James realizes, but the anti-disapparition ward was just taken down. Lily must have just escaped. And by the time the others manage to break through the general ward, his trail will have gone cold.

But still he lingers. 

James makes a choice.

“I’m not going to kill you,” says James savagely, free hand closing into a fist and opening compulsively. “You’re my brother.”  _And whatever else I am, I’m not a kinslayer._

“I killed you,” says Peter, looking aghast. “I  _killed_ you, James-”

“I know what you did.”

“Then-”

_Whatever else you have done, you are my brother. Whatever else we are, we are family. And that means that I cannot give up on you._

“If you want to make it up to me,” says James, “you’ll go to your flat.”

“My... flat?” 

“Your birthday. It’s next week.” 

“I know that.”

“Yeah, well, I had a plan for it.” At Peter’s continuing look of confusion, James drags a hand down his face. “Gifts, Peter, Merlin. So. Get there. Pick ‘em up. Promise me.”

“You’re absolutely mad,” breathes Peter.

James grins, and feels the lightning around him fade, his heart pick up. “Birth defect, Wormtail. You know how it is, I’m sure.”

“James,” says Peter, quietly. “I don’t-”

“Promise me,” says James.

Peter flinches. His hands are shaking. James exhales sharply. The others- Lestrange, he thinks, and another that he doesn’t know- are coming too close for comfort. 

_Time’s up._

“That’s your price, Pete,” says James, before twisting on his heel, darkness swallowing him whole. “Remember that.”

...

Lily hadn’t known how afraid she was, not until James stumbles into their little cave, swearing under his breath and viciously yanking the little dried burrs from his robes. She surges to her feet as soon as he enters; sees the flicker of lightning around his wild hair and lunges, grabbing his shoulders and dragging him into an embrace.

“I was-”  _so afraid,_ are the words that come to her mind, but she cannot say them. Not say them and keep her composure, and Lily’s holding onto that with everything she has. “-well. You took a long time.”

“I got held up.” James eyes flick away for the briefest moment before returning to her. “I met Peter,” he says quietly, and doesn’t move an inch when Lily stiffens in his arms. “He looked- bad.”

“Good,” says Lily venomously.

“You don’t mean that.”

 _“Good,”_ she repeats. “I hope he chokes on what he’s done- I hope they kill him slowly, those fucking bastard Death Eaters-” 

Slowly, she realizes that James hasn’t moved. Her heart thumps against its ribcage. 

“James. James, tell me you didn’t-”

He lets go of her and steps back. “Didn’t what?”

“Let him go!”

“Lils,” he says, and it sounds tired. “What did you think I’d do? Kill him?”

“It’s what I would’ve done,” replies Lily. James shudders, and her fragile hold on her temper breaks. “You know what he’s done!”

“I do,” says James. He runs his hand through his hair and makes it stand straight up. “But-”

“No buts,” exclaims Lily. She is shaking; she cannot look James in the eye.  _How dare he!_ thinks Lily, and she is crying as well, now, helpless little jerks that burst out of her chest in gasps.  _How dare you!_  “What he would have done to our son, our  _son,_ you would forgive that? You would forgive what he did to Sirius?”

“He’s my brother,” says James quietly. “When you chose to forgive Petunia, I didn’t do anything.”

Her wand is in her hand, and it takes all of her control not to raise it. Not to hex James until he’s bleeding from every single orifice, and a few more besides. “Petunia’s never tried to  _kill_ me!”

“D’you know what she’d have done if asked to choose between you and her family?” asks James. “Because I don’t.”

“I can’t do this right now,” says Lily, stepping back. All she can see is the deadened look on James’ face; the way he stands, the fact that just a few moments previous, he let a man who would’ve killed their  _son_ get away. “I can’t- we can’t do this now. 

“You’re right.” James pulls away, face closing off even further. “Where is he?”

“Inside.” 

The sunlight had hurt Sirius’ eyes when Lily apparated them away from Azkaban, so Lily’d guided him inside and called up wards to keep the cave dark. Seeing one more person like this- shattered from within- just reminds Lily of the cost of this war. Of the mindless cruelty. Of all the loss.

Lily’s certain she won’t ever forget the trembling and half-swallowed whimpers from his throat. 

“He needs help.”

Something flashes in James’ eyes, brighter than Lily’s seen since that dementor nearly Kissed him, there and gone in a heartbeat. But he only jerks his head in a nod. Says, “I’ll manage,” with a voice as uneven as the rocks around them, and heads inside.

 _This world isn’t safe,_ she thinks, and grips her wand even tighter.  _We must make it safe, and it is difficult at times; it is terrible at times._

_But- oh- that does not mean we shrink from it._

...

Peter, hunched over half of Rowle’s corpse, does not move, not even when Lestrange swears loud enough to make a flock of birds take flight nearby. He does not move. 

They apparate to their lord, and kneel, and the others tell him tales of lightning sprung from Azkaban, howls and other eldritch sounds from that island- and Peter does not speak, does not move, not until the Dark Lord takes his chin in his hand and wrenches it up to meet his red gaze.

“And you, Peter,” he says. “What did you see?”

He’s been afraid for so long. Peter twitches, full-bodied, and then he thinks about Rowle, about light swallowing him whole. About the blood. James. His lord’s red eyes. The red, red, red-

“Death,” he quavers, and the Dark Lord growls in frustration before releasing him. 

Peter lands on the floor, knees bruised. He presses his head to the cool marble stone and doesn’t dare to move until all four of them are dismissed. His world is a haze of red, blood and guts and the taunting scarlet of Gryffindor, until he apparates away to his flat.

One breath. Two. It isn’t his flat any longer, not for two weeks now, but Peter had bought it in a muggle part of London and it takes nothing more than a simple  _alohomora_ to break in. A slash of his wand, a  _magiea revelio,_ and a heavy package thuds to the floor.

His heart aches. There had been a chance that he’d hallucinated that entire conversation on the beach. But now... hands trembling, Peter opens it.

It’s three books. One’s a joke manual, hand-written by Remus. Another’s a textbook on the Black Plague, with helpful annotations in the margins by Sirius; Peter flips the pages slowly, something bitter spreading through his chest.  _Look into this,_ Sirius has written, underlining it thrice: rats.  _Maybe we can kill some Death Eaters, yeah, Wormtail?_

A helpless laugh tears out of him. 

Finally, Peter puts it down. Reaches for the last book: a leather-bound journal, his name carved into the front. It’s slimmer than Sirius’ but thicker than Remus’ and blank, all of the pages, except for the very first.

_“’Come, my friends,_   
_it is not too late to seek a newer world._   
_Though much is taken, much abides; and though_   
_We are not now that strength which in old days_   
_Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;_   
_One equal temper of heroic hearts,_   
_Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will_   
_To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.’_   
_\- To my quietest friend and dearest brother. I do not know what will come, Wormtail, but I know that I’ve asked more of you than anyone should ever ask anyone else. I know that this war is difficult on all of us. I know that the worst is yet to come, but I know that we’ll get through this, together. Here’s to ten years spent together and a lifetime more!_   
_Wishing you the best birthday anyone can ever have,_   
_Prongs”_

“Though much is taken, much abides,” whispers Peter, tracing the letters written in James’ scrawling script. “That which we are, we are. Oh, damn you, James Potter. Damn you.”

He cannot act against the Dark Lord. The mark on his arm alone precludes that action. But so long as he does not  _know_ anything, and only suspects, then there is a chance. A chance to hide it all, the entirety of the failure of the Dark Lord’s plans. The dizzying magnitude of that failure.

Because if James is alive, then Lily is alive. And if Lily is alive, then there is every chance that Harry is alive as well. And if that is true...

It turns this entire war on its head.

But only if.

A nebulous possibility, all told, but Peter’s a survivor. And if the winds of war are shifting to help  _them-_ then, then, Peter’s going to live. No matter what it takes.

 _Not to yield,_ thinks Peter, and rises to his feet. 

One act, then, for James’ mercy. Nothing much. Nothing ever changed because of an owl. Nothing ever changed because of an unsigned, four-word message. This war won’t hinge on it. But what Peter has torn asunder, he can mend; and that, maybe, hopefully, will be enough.

...

A brown-feathered owl wings over to a camp ringed with silver. It is small, light and excitable; it still barely makes through the sheer number of protections layered on the camp. It alights on man’s shoulder and pecks at his ear. He opens the envelope the owl offers him. Reads what’s written on the page, in large, blocky letters:

_THEY’RE ALIVE. COME BACK._

The sun sets that night on a gibbous moon, and a loud crack splits the silence apart.

The werewolf camp never sees Remus Lupin again.

...

 _Fuck._ Swimming up from the aches, Sirius realizes two things: one, he feels like absolute shit and two, he’s safe. James is the person next to him, James-the-deer-the-man-the-brother, and something heals like sunlight falling on Hogwarts’ turrets: irrevocable, deep and true as his oldest convictions. Then memory returns, and the warm feeling stops like someone’s just stamped on a candle wick.  _Fuck, fuck, fuck._

“Pads?” he hears, from a man that sounds too much like James for him to let lie. “You awake yet?”

Sirius breathes, shallow and measured. Catalogs his pains. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in a fugue state; but he remembers Godric’s Hollow very well. He remembers Azkaban, too, and either Sirius has gone entirely mad or this is reality.

 _Can’t help it if I’ve gone mad,_ he thinks.  _So reality it is, then._

Someone’s rescued him. Someone who looks scarily like Lily, but Sirius doesn’t trust his vision entirely. Red hair and a high voice don’t Lily make. Plus, everyone’s certain that she’s dead. That ruin of Godric’s Hollow... nobody lives through a magical explosion that large. So someone’s rescued him, and they sound  _like_ people he trusts, but he’s pretty sure they’re not said people, which makes them untrustworthy by definition.

Slow breaths. Even. The barest opening of one eye, to see rough stone all around him. Thank Merlin he’s in his dog form; it has better night vision. It also means that the person who’d just spoken- who’d just sounded like James- is human, and at a distinct disadvantage in the dark. It’s too hot; stifled.  _Wards._ A mental snarl. He slits open the other eye, lazy, slow, not shifting one other muscle. Sees the shadow of the man slumped against the opposite wall. Breathes. There, there,  _there,_ a wand dangling loosely from the impostor's fingers. One more breath, then two.

Checks his magical reserves.

He’s got enough. More than enough, considering his starved state. Not enough for a pitched battle, so Sirius can’t stay and fight. He needs to think. The war’s still on. He needs to keep a cool head. To  _think-_

No.

He needs to escape.

Sirius is a Black and a Gryffindor. He does not lie down, and he does not surrender, and it is the space of nothing, absolutely nothing, to shift, to seize the wand, to dig the point straight under the man’s chin.

“You’re going to take down these wards,” he whispers hoarsely. The red-haired woman’s going to be around; it’s vital that this escape remains quiet. “Quickly, now.” The man inhales as if to speak, and Sirius flicks a mild stinging hex at his shoulder.  _“No,_ I don’t want you using your head. Just take these wards- down-” 

Sirius doesn’t need him in the end. It’s simple- almost muscle memory, more than knowledge. The ward falls with his first diagnostic charm.

 _“Silencio,”_ he mutters, and steps back, stumbles. 

Inhales the air- tastes salt. Brine. 

Too similar to Azkaban. 

The man waves his arms wildly. There’s something familiar to the curve of his shoulders, to the flash of light off his specs, but Sirius knows better than to be caught unawares by something so simple. He only adjusts his grip on the wand. Inhales, deep as his lungs can go, and apparates away. 

Lands in a clearing in a forest in the middle of nowhere. Grits his teeth; rolls his shoulders; gets to work.

He’s got a lot to figure out in the next few hours. 

A lot to figure out, and not a lot of time.

...

Remus swears under his breath as he jimmies the lock to his apartment. The keys work, but it tends to get stuck if left unused for long periods of time. And Remus hasn’t come home in- Merlin, months. Peter hadn’t looked too good after his mum broke her leg, so Remus had gone to stay with him for a couple weeks. Then Dumbledore had asked him to go to the werewolf camps to either get their allegiance or- if that was impossible- act as a spy.

He’d known when Lily and James died, of course. Greyback had made sure of that. But he’d also known that stupid little bird, fluttering about his head like a stray wind might blow it away. He hadn’t known the writing, but the Marauders have always been good at hiding their tracks.

The key finally just breaks off inside of the lock; Remus growls and snaps the handle before slamming into the house. 

It’s musty inside. He kicks the door closed behind him and drops his bag on the creaky shelf that serves as his dining table. Remus opens the windows, grimaces at the smoke that enters- he’s close to the full moon, and his nose is far more sensitive than he’d like for this part of the city- but the smoke carries with it fresh air and the flat itself is too full of dust for him to live with. Two flicks of his wand and the furniture’s dust-free. Another, and the kitchen looks practically spotless. 

Slowly, Remus gets through the motions of settling back into the house.

It’s a few hours later that his stomach protests the lack of food. Remus sighs; he has some food packed from the camp, but he doesn’t particularly want some more bloody meat, barely cooked. There’s a good takeout place just a few blocks away that’s not too expensive- the issue is that Remus doesn’t have much money to start with, and he’s not sure how long it needs to last. 

 _Fuck it._ He’s just spent hours hop-scotching from one end of Europe to another.  _I deserve a hot meal tonight._

It’s not too far, though not all that close either. By the time he returns with the covers crinkling in his fingers, there’s sweat darkening his shirt and making him uncomfortably damp in the cold winter. He’s cursing mentally and juggling the stupid cartons and trying not to make enough of a racket to let his landlord know that he’s back- a month’s missing rent tends to have that effect- and it’s why he’s halfway up the stairs by the time he realizes that there’s someone in his home.

Remus freezes.

He stacks the takeout on the landing and takes three quick, quiet steps up the stairs to drag in a breath. Smoke, dust, piss, and underneath it: a scent he knows all too well. 

This time, the door doesn’t survive his strength.

Sirius, stretched out languorously on his couch, jerks upright. Remus disarms him before pointing his wand directly between his eyes.

“Don’t move,” he says softly.

Sirius swallows. He ignores Remus- he usually does-  _did,_ did, goddamn, not does anymore _-_  but only moves enough to sit up properly. “Moony,” he says.

“Give me one reason not to kill you,” says Remus.

“If you want to do it, then do it.” Sirius tilts his head back to meet the light from the streetlight. A faint smile makes his eyes look even darker. “I won’t stop you.”

_There’s a catch._

There usually is, with Sirius.

“But?” asks Remus slowly.

 _“But_  I didn’t do it. If you want revenge, you should probably aim for any rats you see, not me.”

“You didn’t do it?” demands Remus. “You were the secret-keeper. Who else could have-” he breaks off; tries to breathe. Tries to focus on Sirius, who’s spread out on Remus’ couch like it’s just another day. Like they haven’t lost what they’ve lost. Like Sirius isn’t the reason they’ve  _fucking_ lost it. “Don’t you dare lie to me, Black.”

He flinches. “We switched.”

It takes a moment for Remus to make the mental jump. 

“You expect me to believe that?”

“Lily watched Dumbledore set it up with me as the keeper. Then she put up another herself, with Peter. You know how good she was with wards.” Sirius’ eyes, those lovely eyes, those eyes like black fire, haven’t dimmed at all. “I insisted. I thought- who’d suspect Peter? Everyone’d think it’d be me. Never thought it’d end like this.”

“You never thought anything would end,” Remus accuses sharply. “You were always too cocky. I told you-”

“Give me veritaserum, then, and be done with it,” says Sirius, slumping in his position. “But there’s a war on, Moony, and I can’t spend as much time mourning as I’d like. If you won’t trust me, then trust in how much I loved James. I’ll walk into Azkaban the morning we win if you’ll help me now, I swear it. I swear it.”

Looking closer at him, Remus realizes: Sirius looks like absolute shit. 

He’s very pale, but his entire throat looks shadowed with the start of bruises. His jaw’s even sharper than usual and he’s lost more weight than he can afford. Sirius has always been broad and powerfully built, but now he’s sort of- crumpled in on himself. His robes are in tatters and he’s unshaven and he looks like he hasn’t slept in at least half a month.

“Where were you?” he asks. “I thought- someone mentioned-” meaning Greyback, though of course Sirius wouldn’t know that, “-Azkaban, but you wouldn’t be here if that were true.”

“It was true.”

Remus stares.

Sirius elaborates: “Someone did it for me. I escaped ‘em, though, not Azkaban. Nicked that wand off the guy.” He nods to the wand clutched in Remus’ white-knuckled grip. “Spent the day apparating around to throw off their scent, then came back here.” He shrugs, a carefree lift of one shoulder that shouldn’t leave Remus’ mouth as dry as it does. “Thought I could rest for a few hours. A safehouse, as it were.”

“Someone?” Remus asks carefully.

“Me,” says a voice behind them.

It’s instinct. 

Remus whirls around, the world going white around the edges with panic. He doesn’t realize that he’s tossed Sirius his wand until he sees the shield go up around them, right on the heels of his blasting spell. There’s a shower of plaster and wood as the door Remus just broke down spins into the intruder. A second later and Sirius is standing beside him, body a line of warmth at his right.

“Breathe,” Sirius mutters, nudging him. “This’s still muggle London. They won’t try anything big.”

“Apparition wards?” 

“None.”

“Can you smell who-”

“I don’t trust it,” Sirius says grimly. “I keep thinking-”

“That I’m alive?” A voice that Remus knows too well, a voice that shouldn’t  _exist_ any longer, speaks up. Remus’ hand is trembling; Sirius’ breath is harsh and uneven in his ear. Then someone picks themselves up out of the debris, and Remus  _knows_ that lean line of shoulder and neck. That careless angle of his wand. That fucking hair. “I thought you’d have more faith in me, both of you.” 

James Potter grins at them, glasses dusted white and mostly blind but also-

 _Alive,_ thinks Remus numbly.  _Alive. Alive. Alive-_

“I’m a fucking marauder, you morons,” he says, taking off the specs and trying to wipe the dust off. “It takes more than a dark lord to kill me.”

There’s breathless silence for all of a heartbeat, and then Sirius gives a wordless, inchoate scream of something that might have been anger or relief or pain or some Black malady of too much emotion and lunges straight at James. He punches James straight in the jaw, and after that both of them are shouting and grunting and rolling incomprehensibly over each other.

It’s ugly. Sirius tends to be stronger than James, but James keeps his head about him even in the worst situations. There’s a lot of clawing and kneeing and yanked hair strewn about the opening of his flat.

It gets even worse when Lily enters. 

Remus chokes on his spit when she does; she looks- like the rest of them- exhausted, but also alive, which means it’s an exponentially better situation than Remus had thought just a few minutes previous. But it’s bad because she brings with her Remus’ landlord, and he looks pissed to high heavens- his expression goes darker when he sees James and Sirius banging about as they are. 

“Goodtoseeyouweshouldgetoutofhererightnow,” Lily says quickly, eyes flicking between the two white-covered lumps still making loud, intermittent noises that could have been charitably called grunts and Remus’ shabby flat. Then, a little slower, with a meaningful look at the landlord: “I think there’s  _people_  around.”

That’s the breaking point for Remus’ landlord. His face goes puce. He bellows, loud enough to make Remus’ ears throb and- more importantly- to get Sirius and James to pause, “Out!  _Out!_ If yer not out in a minute I’ll call the coppers and have ‘em twist yer ears ‘til they bleed!” 

He’s not sure when they bundle themselves down the stairs, nor when his entire life’s belongings return to his mildly-charmed knapsack, nor when James apparates them to a seaside cliff. It all goes a little bit numb there; Remus breathes when his chest hurts and moves when prodded and otherwise just panics very, very quietly in the privacy of his mind.

Panics.

Because if Sirius switched, then Peter was the traitor. Because if Peter was the traitor-  _is_ the traitor- then Remus’ entire task to the werewolves has been in vain. Because there’s only one way Remus could have swayed any of the werewolves to the Order’s side, and that’s by sneaking it under the alpha’s notice. If Greyback hadn’t known, then it should have worked. But if Peter had told Voldemort and if Voldemort had told Greyback...

Not panic, then. Not truly.

Rage.

Remus holds onto the fraying strands of his control. 

Years lost to a fruitless task. A big bonus, too, to Voldemort’s side: Remus is a good dueler, almost on par with Sirius even if neither of them are quite as good as James. With him tied up in dealing with Greyback, it means one less wand attacking the Death Eaters. 

Years. 

All that sacrifice- kneeling, that very first moon, to Greyback; Remus tends to forget most of his time as a wolf but not that, not that painful humiliation- eating raw meat- watching werewolves turn helpless children, marking them- 

“Remus? Rem- Moony? Moony-”

Remus flattens his hands on the soil. 

“Get back,” he growls. There’s someone touching him on his shoulder, but his irritation flares; that person yelps and backs away. 

He hasn’t had an incident like this since he was very young; years before Hogwarts. But he can feel it- the way the magic rises to match his fury- and Remus knows better than to try to suppress it. Not now, so close to the full moon, and especially not after he’s nearly drained himself with the travel across Europe. He doesn’t have the control to do much more than direct the magic. Hopefully it’ll be enough. Remus inhales, and on the exhale, pushes his magic into the earth.

It goes. Deeper and deeper and deeper. Down to the roots of the trees clinging to life on wind-battered cliffs. 

So few people know who Remus is. His father’s story is well-known: a muggleborn speaking out against Greyback, whose son was brutally attacked. A muggleborn who married a pureblood McKinnon, against all the people trying to convince her otherwise. Remus is a Lupin because that is his father’s name. But his mother’s blood flows through him as well and he has always,  _always,_  had an affinity to the earth.

It had always been a sore point between him and Sirius- what Remus could possibly have to talk to with Marlene. All those long hours in the greenhouses ought to have meant something, though it would never have occurred to Sirius that they’d passed the time simply talking about family. Family that Marlene loved, and Remus’ mother loved as well.

Syllables spurt from his tongue, ancient, guttural. Remus closes his eyes and bends forward, presses his forehead to the earth.

_What we have come from, we shall return to. That which is given can be taken. The earth can take this rage within me, for it is stronger than those I love can bear._

Tiny fissures in the earth form. Coalesce. Deepen. Remus digs his fingers into the soil, claws at it, feels his nails start to tear, and the cracks deepen. 

He thinks about Peter, smiling tearfully in his family home, yellow curtains blowing in the wind. He thinks about burying Marlene and Martin and nearly fifty McKinnons, saying an eulogy and a prayer and a blessing for them all, because there’s nobody else to do it. He thinks about Caradoc Dearborn, who’d offered Remus a job in his law firm just hours before he was chopped into pieces by Death Eaters. 

He thinks about Greyback.

The wind howls, and the trees shake, and slowly, inexorably, the cliff is sheared away from the land. It stops at the point where his forehead touches the earth, as the ritual is meant to do, and when Remus rises, he sees that the sea’s churning angrily like a large mass of earth has just been dropped into it.

“Remus?” asks Lily, uncertain and more than a little taken aback. The others look the same, so he supposes it must have been an unnerving display.

Remus turns. “I was angry,” he says hoarsely. Swallows. “It- I couldn’t bottle it up, either, because my magic was so drained. I lost control. And earth magic’s my... forte. So I made sure it didn’t hurt anyone.”

“It’s a good thing we’d packed it up, then, or everything’d be drowned,” says James, lips quirking. 

He blinks. “You were staying in a cave?”

“It was a good cave,” says Lily dryly.

“Lily-”

“We have to leave anyways,” she continues, speaking over him. “The magic- if the Ministry figures it out...” 

Sirius jams his hands in his pockets. He looks the most weary of all of them, like a stiff wind might just carry him over. Remus looks away from them. He’s so fucking exhausted himself; all that rage has died down to a small kernel in his gut, and now he’s just cold. 

“Yeah,” he says and stands. “Got any ideas?”

Remus manages one step, then two, before the dizziness hits. He staggers. Darkness flashes at the corners of his eyes as he tries to get his balance back. A moment later, Sirius’ face, white and strained, enters his field of view.

“Magical exhaustion,” Remus grits out as reassuringly as he can manage. “Just- need-”

 _Rest,_ he thinks, but words swim away from him before he can voice it.

The blackness swallows him up. Remus, almost gratefully, surrenders to it.

...

“Most people get exhausted from just five apparitions.”

Sirius glances up at James. Remus’ head is resting in his lap, and though he’s got more scars and too-ragged hair, he looks good. Warm. When Sirius saw that blood in Godric’s Hollow, he’d never even dreamed this might happen again.

“It takes at least ten to make it from Albania,” Sirius agrees. “I don’t know how he managed.”

“Yes, well.” James grimaces. “He’s always got such control over it, you know. I never could manage it even a little.”

“Takes breaking a cliff to make him faint. Not exactly easy.”

“Earth magic?”

“Mm. He always did like those ‘Puffs.”

“Marlene was a Gryffindor.”

Sirius narrows his eyes. “Bastard never told me.”

“You know Remus, though,” James points out.

Which is fair. Remus doesn’t tell people things. He holds onto his secrets like they’re going to kill him if he lets go even a little. If you confronted him, he’d admit to only just enough to get you off his back. Asking him about his werewolf thing had been like pulling teeth; asking him about why he’d given up being prefect in their sixth year had been even worse; he’d just flat out refused to tell by the time they’d graduated.

It’d been half the reason why Sirius suspected him, by the end.

 _Not the end,_ he reminds himself. 

Through some miraculous lifeline, it isn’t the end.

“Any clues on when we’re leaving?” he asks. 

It’s not a subtle change of topic, but both of them are tired. Better to talk about necessities than life-changing secrets. Better yet to not talk, Sirius thinks to himself. He’ll run his mouth as much as shout in this state, and with Remus unconscious and Lily nervy herself, it won’t end well. Remus had the experience enough to ground his magic into his element; Sirius is fairly certain that if either he or Lily do it- both of them strong, and violent, and even worse, flashy- they’ll blow a hole in the land that’d rival the size of Manchester.

James- bless his heart- seems to realize that. He glances back at Lily, who’s pacing the edge of the cliff, muttering to herself. She doesn’t look too good.

“Where, not when,” he corrects. “If we had a clue... well, we’d be gone by now. But we need wards and, preferably, a library. We have clues on how to go forward, but no information. It’s driving Lils mad.”

Wards. Library. Something sifts through Sirius’ mind. Funerals and articles and pitying looks in the middle of Diagon. 

_This is a bad idea._

“’s it about dark magic?”

James frowns. “Yeah. Think so.”

 _Oh, this is a_ bad  _idea._

“I’ve got a place, then.”

...

Breaking into Grimmauld Place is... not difficult.

Sirius winces as they enter- it’s moldy and dusty, but the worse part is the Dark magic, humming in the very air like an army of locusts. But both the  _homenum revelios_ that he and James cast return nothing; his mother’s left the house, it seems, and even Kreacher isn’t there.

More importantly, the number of wards cast over the house ensure it’s practically unassailable. And the library is one of the finest in all of Europe.

That first night, Sirius puts James and Lily in Regulus’ rooms, because if there’s one room that his mother wouldn’t have spelled with traps it would be that one. He levitates Remus into his own rooms. A few cursory waves of his wand ensure that there aren’t any unpleasant surprises on the bed. And after that, he doesn’t get much beyond spelling his shoes off before he falls asleep, stretched out loosely next to Remus.

...

Lily hates it. 

Grimmauld Place is unfriendly, from the house elf straight down to the very walls. James and Sirius don’t see it; they’re purebloods, and all those little pinpricks of magic and spells that remind her that she wasn’t born into this world don’t even seem to register. That’s not entirely a surprise, of course. Lily’d expected that when she began dating James and had accepted it quietly when she wed him. But she’s also always had friends to complain with- Mary, and Colleen, and Jenna, who was in Ravenclaw but liked Lily enough to invite her into their common room when she wanted the company- and Remus, as well, to a certain extent.

Remus is too frail to even think about any of that now, though. 

Three days passed, and he spends most of his time sleeping. It’s getting better, of a sorts, in that Remus wakes for longer intervals; but that’s only from what Sirius reports to them. Apart from eating and ensuring that Kreacher can’t spill their secrets to others, Sirius stays shut in his old room with Remus, and nothing Lily or James do can coax him out.

It’s even worse now, because she and James are fighting. It isn’t a proper fight, exactly, not like some of the raging rows they’d had in the middle of the Gryffindor common room. 

 _Maybe we’ve grown up,_ thinks Lily wryly.  _Maybe we’ve moved past shouting at each other._

Because this isn’t a battle to be won with harsh words or screams. There’s too much hurt on both sides- hurt pride, hurt love, and outrage as well, because Lily knows that James thinks he’s as right in his actions as Lily’s certain he’s wrong- and if it isn’t a loud fight, it’s something like milk left on the stove and forgotten. It boils over. It stinks up the entire house. It’s a pain to clean up.

So Lily doesn’t bother. She’s already wasted two days trying to get the Black wards to untangle for her before leaving it for a lost cause. Azkaban’s wards had been far more complicated, but these knots can only be loosened with Black blood, and Lily doesn’t have any of that in her veins. Instead, she settles into the library and lets herself research, properly research, like she hasn’t been able to do in years.

...

It is- a week, or perhaps more, when Sirius is kidnapped.

Not kidnapped, not exactly, but he wakes in a different place than where he went to bed. He remembers sleeping beside Remus. He remembers the moonlight shafting through the window, the curtain stirring in the chill wind. He remembers...

_Silver fingers and the call of a wind so harsh it bruises-_

_Black robes cut flawlessly-_

_A voice of contempt and thunder-_

His wand leaps to his fingers and slashes a line of fire at the figure standing behind the desk. Sirius growls, low in his throat, as it dissipates before ever reaching the man’s face and rolls out of the chair he’d been sitting on to come up just in front of the fireplace.

Arcturus Black, Sirius’ grandfather and Head of House, doesn’t even flinch. “Sit down, boy,” he says levelly. 

“Let me go,” whispers Sirius. 

Distantly, he realizes that his wand is trembling. 

“I think not. Sit down.”

“I will not,” Sirius retorts. His wand might tremble; but his voice doesn’t. “I am not yours any longer. You’ve no power to compel me, not since I turned sixteen. Five years have passed, Grandfather.”

“I’d known you to be a Gryffindor, not a fool.”

“And I’m alive when your precious son and son’s favored son are both dead,” Sirius says, letting his voice turn ugly. “Let me go.”

“Sit  _down,”_ snarls Arcturus, suddenly sharp, and Sirius flinches. He finds himself obeying, too, with an alacrity that makes old rage sing in him like a honed sword. The anger in Arcturus’ face fades, though, replaced with thoughtfulness. Sirius rather dislikes the latter more than the former. “And so it is shown at last,” he says. “I could not have commanded your cousin so easily, had I a mind to try.”

 _Slytherins._ Sirius can feel his breath rasping in his chest. Can feel the ache in his lower back, from sitting so stiffly. He lets his own eyes narrow and inspect Arcturus closely.  _Always saying one thing, meaning another._

“You think Andromeda would have let you?”

_Sometimes the only answer is to force the truth out of them._

“When you are disowned, there is nothing that can be done,” says Arcturus. “That is the ritual that you demanded your parents perform in place of the  _Heredis Familias_ , is it not?”

Sirius bows his head. He hates thinking about that night. His father wanted to name him the heir to the Heir of the House of Black, or more properly- the heir to the  _Heredis_ of the House of Black, which is a role of itself with different responsibilities and powers than that of the Head. But while magic protects the  _Heredis_ from manipulation and magical cruelty at the hands of both Head and other family, the heir to the  _Heredis_ is given none of those. Sirius knows,  _knows,_ down deep in his bones, that his father would have bound him with such familial magics as to leave him a shell, barely able to do what he’s ordered.

“Yes,” he replies, and looks up to meet Arcturus’ gaze. If his grandfather hadn’t wanted him disowned, then he should have interfered earlier. “Now,  _let me go.”_

“And yet I can command you. With great strain, but it is possible. You could walk into the London home, when the wards ought to have drowned you alive.” Arcturus doesn’t even seem to register his words. “Can you imagine why?”

“No,” snaps Sirius.

“Because Orion and Walburga never disowned you.”

Sirius jerks a hand up.  _“Impossible.”_

“Oh, they did it legally. But magically? Orion was never a fool.” Cold satisfaction gleams in Arcturus’ eyes. “He was waiting for his second son to prove himself worthy. A pity they both died before that could be finished.”

_A pity? A pity!_

“Your only son and his only son are dead, and you don’t even care?” Sirius’ lip curls. “I’m glad I fled when I did, rather than remain in a home like this.”

“You wish to leave?” asks Arcturus.

“I think I’ve made that pretty fucking clear!”

“You enter one of my homes,” muses Arcturus, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together. “You bring a werewolf with you. You have the absolute gall to desecrate the homes of your ancestors by ruining those portraits. And when I call you here to question you, you think yourself in the right?"

“Who’re you to question me?”

“The owner,” says Arcturus silkily, “of the home you’re currently staying in.”

Sirius jerks his head away. Thinks, furiously. Finally, he says, more sulky than he likes, “I needed a safe place. I thought- we needed a place with wards. And better we die quick with the Black wards than slowly outside.”

“Death, Grandson? I would’ve thought you too Gryffindor to give up so easily.”

“War teaches you things.” Sirius shrugs. 

Slowly, Arcturus inclines his head. “Indeed. In light of that- an equal bargain, then?”

Sirius stares at him. 

 _Equal bargain?_ Sirius flexes his fingers over his wand, as much for reassurance as to ensure he’s ready for anything else Arcturus throws at him.  _What the hell’s he playing at?_

An equal bargain, after all, can only be done between equals. That is how the magic  _works,_ it only ensures the truth’s spoken when it’s equals. It can’t be used by a teacher to find out if a student’s cheating; it can’t be used by a general to make deals with spies; it can’t be used by a Head to bring an errant family member to heel.

_I’m not a Hufflepuff to trust you blindly. I’m a Gryffindor, and that means I’ll drag you out of the shadows._

“Why?” Sirius asks, tilting his head to stare at Arcturus. Arcturus lifts an eyebrow, deliberately obtuse, and Sirius snarls internally. “The ritual’s meant for merchants. Won’t take hold if we’re not equals. If we don’t think of each other as such.”

“There are many books in the Black libraries,” says Arcturus. Holds up a hand at Sirius’ snort. “Let me finish,” he says, and it’s so dangerous that Sirius finds his mouth snapping shut of its own volition. “Many books, and many tales. A ritual for merchants, you say, and it’s used this way today- but once upon a time, it wasn’t. Once, it was used between generals. Between the left hand of Lady Genevieve and the first Minister of Magic, more than seven hundred years ago.” Sirius swallows, hard. Arcturus is staring at him so intently. “It was that agreement that allowed us to leave the muggles behind. Four hundred years we’d been separated before even the Statute of Secrecy. A monumental moment. ‘Tis fitting that this be another such meeting.”

“It won’t  _work_ if we don’t think of each other as equals,” Sirius retorts. “The history’s fine and all, but I’m not sure how you think that holds true for us.”

Arcturus smiles, slow, thin-lipped. “Was this not your oldest grievance against us all, Grandson? That we did not treat you as you ought to have been, with the rights that were yours by virtue of birth?” He nods. “Accept, now, and clasp my hand- and see if that has changed.”

_The oldest wrong._

Because Sirius hadn’t been the faultless son, and his father had retaliated by removing him from those privileges that an heir ought to have had. Because Sirius has learned right and wrong and a hundred other things in the years away- seven in Hogwarts, and five past it- but before that, always, has been his pride and his love and his rage, simmering underneath as a flame too low to see until the pot’s a burnt mess.

 _Not a Head to his family._ Sirius breathes in, and it shakes.  _One general to another._ Hope sings in him like a fresh dawn.  _If this is true-_

He reaches out one palm. Feels Arcturus’ grip it. Stares into his grandfather’s eyes.

“Information,” he agrees, carefully, “for information.”

The magic slots into place above them like swords made of blue light. Sirius rips his hand from Arcturus to pace on the carpet, restless energy in his veins, before he turns back to grip the back of the chair he’d been sitting on.

“You’re starting,” he tells Arcturus.

Something shadows Arcturus’ face. “My heir is gone, and my heir’s heir." His voice is perfectly inflectionless. “I know their murderer. I know that House Black has call to declare a blood feud with a Dark Lord, and the only reason we have not done so is because we are not powerful enough for it.”

“You think Volde-”

“-do  _not_ use that name!” 

“-You-Know-Who, then,” Sirius says impatiently, “you think he killed my- father? And Regulus?”

“Enough to declare a blood feud.”

_Strong evidence, then._

Blood feuds are bad business. Rivers have literally run red with the blood of feuding houses. For Arcturus to even think about declaring one...

Well.

They have an ally, now, and though Sirius will have to watch for betrayal- it is still better than the previous morning, when it would have been the four of them against all of the world.

“There is a prophecy,” he says casually, watching Arcturus’ face for the effect of the revelation. “Regarding  _his_ defeat.”

“Do you know it?”

“Yes.” Sirius pauses just long enough to ensure it’s clear that he won’t elaborate. “Tell me why I’m here.”

“Because I need an heir,” says Arcturus simply. “As it stands, the heir shall be a Malfoy, through Narcissa, and I’ve no wish to see that occur.”

_My turn._

_Do I trust him?_ Oh, Sirius doesn’t, and he’s certain that he shouldn’t. But information for information is a time-honored truce. And Sirius recognizes that vicious desire for vengeance, singing rich in Arcturus’ blood. That same blood that runs in Sirius, twice over from both mother and father.  _Carefully, then._

“ _The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches,”_ he recites, not looking away from Arcturus.  _“Born to those who have thrice defied him, born as the seventh month dies, and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not. And either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.”_

For just a heartbeat, so quick that Sirius would have missed it had he not been looking so closely, triumph flashes across Arcturus’ eyes like sunlight off frozen stone. But it fades, and is replaced by his calm mask once more.

“The Dark Lord thinks it speaks of the Potter boy?”

“Or Neville Longbottom,” says Sirius slowly.

Arcturus closes his eyes and tilts his head back. Light fractures off his face, like something seen through a kaleidoscope. Sirius sees something that he hadn’t ever seen before: relief, and hope, burning bright as dawn’s first rays. He can’t help but think that he’s missing something.

“Another trade, I think,” says Arcturus. Sirius jerks and stares. That voice- it’s rich, deep, forceful. Arcturus hasn’t sounded like that in Sirius’ entire lifetime. “Not truth for truth, but rather a gift for another.”

“I’ve nothing to offer,” says Sirius.

A razor smile, thin, bladed. “You have not a name or allies,” he agrees. “But your word? For all that your parents doubted of you, your honor was never one of them.”

Irritation flickers in Sirius’ mind. “Just because I wasn’t as  _cold_ as they wanted-”

“Become the  _Heredis,_ and all shall be forgiven.”

“I’ve done nothing to forgive!”

“Accept my offer,” says Arcturus, unmoved. “If not for yourself, then for those who depend upon you- that werewolf, for instance, who yet seeks shelter in my home.”

The fireplace behind him roars into being so loudly that it deafens Sirius for a moment. He hisses, fingers digging so hard into the chair’s arm that the wood crumples inwards. Sirius feels the fury in his chest at Arcturus’ implicit threat, takes that fury, caresses it into something as sweet and palatable as wine. 

“You think I’d give up freedom for the use of one house?” he asks, and then smiles at the brief hesitance in his grandfather’s eyes.  _Yes. I am not tame, no matter how much you wish otherwise._  “I am a Gryffindor, yes, and that should’ve warned you, Grandfather: if you touch Remus, if you even  _try,_ I’ll not stop until I’ve ripped you limb from limb and then shredded every piece of the Black legacy into  _dust.”_

“Two gifts then,” says Arcturus after a pause. His lips are pressed so tightly together that they look bloodless. “One, to use Black properties as you wish. Second, access to the gold of all the Black vaults of Gringotts. And in return, you’ll allow yourself to be named the  _Heredis_ of House Black at the end of this war.”

Sirius exhales slowly. “One gift cannot match two.”

A spark, buried deep in Arcturus’ eyes, flares and dies. It looks like approval. Because Sirius remembers the traditions? Because he’s spent years trying to forget, and all it’s taken is a room of dark mahogany and cold words to roll all those years back?

“No,” says Arcturus softly. “It cannot. The second shall be a vow, to defeat the Dark Lord or die trying.”

_I am already trying to do that. Why would you waste another gift?_

He is definitely missing something. But Sirius knows that he won’t be able to find out; if nothing else, Arcturus will deny it to his last breath. All he can do is hope that he won’t be caught blind by his vow.

All he can be is brave.

“Very well,” says Sirius instead. “I accept.”

The magic above them dissolves in a shower of dust. The cool edge to the room that had come from the ritual fades as well, until all that’s left is the study and its smoking fireplace. 

“Then it is done.” Arcturus bows his head and rises, heading to the fireplace. He opens an ivory box and reveals the green Floo powder in it. Sirius rises, hand almost brushing the powder, when Arcturus pulls it away, just enough for Sirius to look up at him. “But there is a chance for more, is there not, Grandson?”

“More what?” Sirius asks warily.

“One last bargain. A challenge, let us say, to see who you are: the puling brat of your mother’s words, or the man who survived Azkaban with both mind and body intact to a surprising degree.”

“And if I don’t accept?”

“Then you may go. But I have information that might be... interesting to you. On the Dark Lord.”

Sirius’ hand clenches. “You want him defeated just as much as I do.”

“That need not mean I spoon-feed you answers,” says Arcturus airily. “Tell me, now, whether you accept the challenge or wish to flee it.”

_If I don’t take it, he’ll think me a coward. If I do take it, he’ll think me reckless. There’s no way I can win._

_Not unless I do this for myself, and ignore what he thinks._

And Sirius would give much to know what his grandfather knows. He’s certain that he won’t die in this challenge; that would negate this entire conversation, the effort that Arcturus has gone to ensure this occurs. Even more, pain is something Sirius can handle.

“Tell me, then,” Sirius says abruptly. 

This time, it’s unmistakable in Arcturus’ eyes: approval, bright and cold as the stars around them.

“Follow me.”

Arcturus walks out of the study, not looking behind if Sirius follows. After a brief hesitation, Sirius does, inspecting the rest of the house curiously. The study’s the only room that he remembers of  _Nox Aeterna,_ the ancient home of the Head of House Black, and the rest of the house is fascinating in it’s own way. Not so dark and gloomy as Grimmauld Place, but rather airy, with large windows and curtains that shine in shades of blue and silver.

They stop at a balcony, overlooking a choppy sea far beneath.

Arcturus leans forwards and grips the balustrade, knuckles bleaching of color. 

“Trust is in little supply and great demand,” he says quietly. Sirius can barely hear him over the roar of the ocean. “And the only truth that is of import now is that of magic.” His gaze swings back to meet Sirius’. “We do this the old way, that which has been forgotten for long years: prove yourself, if you are to be named Heir.”

Sirius lifts his wand and takes one step forwards. Arcturus matches that move. He, too, reaches up; but only to grip Sirius’ chin, bruising in its strength.

Then he twists and in a flash, Sirius is braced over the railing. He yelps in shock, straining for his magic. But Arcturus is older and more prepared- he presses, so that Sirius is nearly bent in half backwards, head pushed so far that he sees the endless grey of the ocean instead of Arcturus’ cruel face.

“You called flame when threatened,” Sirius hears him say, as if from a long distance. “But you are a Black and our home has never been that. It has always been that water from which we first emerged, dripping, to conquer the earth. Call the water beneath you, if you do not wish to be swallowed by it!”

...

Arcturus observes his grandson passionlessly.

He’s shaking, the boy; he’s an undisciplined mess, and an idiot, and a blood-traitor to boot. But he’s clever. Even now, his magic surges around him like an uncontrollable tempest. Even now, terrified and half-broken from Azkaban, Sirius is  _powerful._

The waves so far beneath them rise, slowly, in response to Sirius’ call.

_The ancient call of the Blacks._

Arcturus watches the glittering rainbow strands of water spiraling up to the balcony. He hadn’t done this for Orion or Regulus, too afraid that the ritual would damage them beyond all recognition. He regrets that now. There’s much he regrets, but most of all the ruin of the House of Black in less than five years.

It all began with Sirius’ flight from London in the dead of night. It will end today, with Sirius’ return.

 _Do you know what you will become?_ Arcturus shoves forwards, grim and harsh, and feels satisfaction like silk on his spine at the way the water almost touches Sirius’ palms.  _Do you know what you represent?_

For too long has there been two sides in war: Dumbledore and the Dark Lord, with the nebulous Ministry a coin tossed and used by both. But now Sirius is in a Black home of his own volition, and hope lives in Arcturus once more. A boy born at the end of the seventh month, to parents who’ve defied the Dark Lord thrice over? Oh, there has always been more to the magic of prophecy than anyone can put into words, and Arcturus will not let the flame of hope gutter out because of other’s plots. 

Between Dumbledore and the Dark Lord, Arcturus knows whom he shall side with. Between the Dark Lord and another side, one where the Blacks can stand tall and proud... 

_I am a Black. And for too long, the world has forgotten what that means. It is time for us to step out now._

The world shall change, immeasurably, and Arcturus will be there to see it happen. 

He’ll be there to  _make_ it happen.

No matter what it takes.

...

James is in the kitchen, curled over a mug of tea, when Sirius floos into it. He stumbles in and sits down, hard, on a chair.

“I didn’t know you’d gone out,” says James slowly.

Sirius makes a face back at him. “Wasn’t by choice. M’grandfather kind of... kidnapped me.”

“Arcturus?” asks James, startled. Half-rises out of his chair. “Do we have to leave?”

“No.” Sirius shakes his head. “It was- weird. He was-  _weird.”_

James looks at him closer. But that answers fewer questions than it raises; Sirius is white, bone-white, and shaking, and his hair is-

“Did you go  _swimming?”_

“I wish,” snorts Sirius, leaning back in the chair and pressing a wrist against his eyes. “The bastard shoved me off a fucking balcony, ‘cause it’d prove something to him. Guess he was angry I hit him with  _incendio."_

 _“Incendio?”_ asks James, morbidly fascinated. He’s never fully understood the Blacks and their family; how they’re so cruel to each other all the time, for no reason other than that they can. “Did he need healing?”

“Like he’d have let it touch him.”

And it’s anger that James sees now, crystallized and frozen. His hand drops and reveals Sirius’ eyes, shining like slate-stone: unyielding. He’s not shaking from fear or adrenaline. It’s just rage, pure as diamond crystals. And though he’s soaked through from his hair down to his clothes, he also looks far better than he’s done for the past week while they’ve hidden and scrounged around the house.

Rest isn’t something that either of them are good at.

“He treated me like a respected opponent,” says Sirius flatly. “Information for information, gift for gift, and finally: assurance for assurance. He spoke to me- one leader to another. Offered me the Black money and properties if I took the name.” He looks at James. “I took it.”

“Sirius-”

“I told him the prophecy, too.”

James inhales sharply. “That was a good idea?”

“I don’t fucking know, do I?” Sirius waves his wand and grabs the firewhiskey bottle that breaks out of the cellar before it can shatter against the table. Another flick, and the bottle’s opened, and he takes a deep swig of it. “But I did it.”

_And now we have to live with it._

“Why’d he push you off a balcony?” James asks softly.

Sirius tips his head back. “Because he wanted to give me something and couldn’t think of a way of doing it without being a horrible fucking human being.”

 _“Sirius,”_ says James.

“A book. That’s what he gave. For proving myself worthy of his  _fucking_ House, I got a book.” From under Sirius’ robes, he reveals an old tome. Slams it onto the table. “You-Know-Who asked for it. That’s how my dad died, apparently, getting this back into the Black library. The curses You-Know-Who put up around it shriveled his heart into ash, but he got away. Got back home. Here. And that’s how he died, the stupid son of a bitch.”

James steps forwards and presses his hand against Sirius’ shoulder. He can feel the tremors through it- aborted as soon as Sirius can manage, but not truly hidden. Not to James, who knows Sirius almost better than he knows himself.

“I’m going to take that to Lily,” he says quietly. “And then I’m coming back here with Remus, and we’re gonna forget everything else. One night, Sirius. I think we’re owed that.”

 _No,_ thinks James, tightening his grip on Sirius’ shoulder, sadness a gulf beneath him that can swallow him if he allows it.  _We’re owed far more. But this is what we have. And we’ll live with that. Like we have, for so long that we forget how to ask for more._

But there are things that cannot be forgotten, no matter how long they take to return. And James is alive, and his friends are alive, and that is all that matters. So long as they live, they can do more. So long as they live, they can hope.

They can dream.

...

Remus watches James watch Sirius.

Sirius is good at hiding his emotions from everyone who’s not James, and James is notoriously  _bad_ at keeping his feelings off his face. Add alcohol to the mix and it’s like taking candy from a child. Remus feels a vague sort of guilt for taking such shameless advantage, but it’s James who’d invited him to a party consisting of hard alcohol while Remus is incapable of consuming it with all the healing potions running through his system. 

“One day,” says James, words all slurring together, “we’re gonna get away to a nice place. Have a vacation. The four o’ us. Somewhere  _warm,_ where it isn’t raining. No Lily, no kids. I just want-”

“Three,” says Remus quietly.

James looks back at him, eyes blinking. For less than a heartbeat, his eyes look like the firewhiskey in his hand, gold and glittering and inhuman. “Wha’?”

“Three of us, James. Not four.”

“You’re backing out?” he demands, with all the fervor of a person who’s properly sloshed. “Well, fuck you too, Lupin. Making our schedules line up’s hard enough without you being such a bore.”

“I’m not talking about our schedules,” says Remus, with considerably more patience than he’d ever thought he had. “And I’d be happy to come. But Peter’s... not around anymore.”

“I’ll pound that bastard’s face in,” mumbles Sirius from the other side of the table, head pressed against the wood. “Next time I see ‘im. Straight in. No magic. I want to see it  _happen.”_

“Yes, well.” Remus turns back to James, whose glaring intently at Sirius. “Jam- Prongs, look-”

“That’s not nice,” says James, rolling his shoulders. “I’ve seen him, you know, and he looks like absolute shit. Doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him, I don’t think, the poor bastard.”

Remus stills. Across from him, Sirius slowly lifts his head. 

“When?” asks Remus, deathly quiet.

“Right before we got Sirius out. Lily was doing that- I was the decoy.” James’ jaw juts forward priggishly, but all that means is that he’s being stubborn. “He was there. I spoke to him.”

“You  _spoke_ to him?” 

James nods. 

“Oh, how fucking magnanimous of you,” hisses Remus, hands clenching and unclenching on his wand. “Speaking to the man who gave you up for You-Know-Who! What, did you debate values with him? Tell him that he  _shouldn’t have,_ it made your life a little fucking difficult? You absolutely sanctimonious  _arse_  of a pureblood, do you even know what he’s done to the  _rest_ of us!”

“Wormtail,” says James, soft as a thread of spider silk. “Our friend. That’s who you’re talking about like this.”

“Damn right!” snarls Remus. “The man who betrayed you, who would’ve stood by and killed your son, you, your wife- you ever wonder why you met him there? Because you were rescuing Sirius. Why were you rescuing Sirius?  _Because Peter put him there!”_

“We get to be afraid,” says James quietly. “You can’t demand people not to feel.”

“He chose to be a part of this war!”

“Did he? Truly, down deep, after all of us had made our choices- did he get one?”

“Yes,” says Sirius, so abrupt that both of them startle and turn to him. Sirius’ eyes are red and he looks like he’s been through a whirlwind right before being dumped into the chair, but there’s sobriety in his eyes that hadn’t been there just moments before. “Yeah, Prongs, he did get one. Just ‘cause he was too afraid to take it then doesn’t mean he gets to take this one now.”

“Then that’s your decision,” says James. 

“You’re right.” 

Remus spins around so fast that his back cracks, to see Lily standing in the doorway. Her hair’s thick and loose down her back; her face is as steady as a statue carved of stone.

“We won’t ask you to kill him,” says Lily calmly. “We won’t ask you to hate him. But you won’t ask the opposite of us, either. It is your choice to forgive him; it is ours to not do so.”

“Lils-”

“I found something,” she continues, without missing a beat. James’ mouth clicks shut. “The book that Sirius brought back- I’ve found out what that damned ring is. I thought you lot might want to come to see it.”

“I’d love to, but-”

“But?” asks Lily, dangerously sweet, stone face cracking to show something seething and  _hot_ beneath.

That’s when Remus realizes that though she hasn’t demonstrated too much of her anger, that doesn’t mean that she isn’t feeling it. The Lily in front of him right now is frayed over at the seams, held together with sheer determination alone. She’s not in the frame of mind to understand why James wanted a day’s relaxation; Remus rather suspects that Lily’d been even angrier when James told her his plan.

 _She’s pushing herself too hard,_ he thinks wearily.  _And when it becomes too much- and it will, sooner rather than later- she’ll collapse._

Remus cannot stop her. 

But he can hold her together through it, whenever that happens. And that means that he needs to recover quickly- even quicker than he has been- because Merlin knows that Sirius and James aren’t capable of recognizing an impending breakdown until it’s actually happening in front of them.

“But,” he says now, before James can say something unfortunately stupid, “both of these berks are drunk. Anything you say’s gonna fly straight over their heads.”

“Like it doesn’t normally,” says Lily, caustic as acid, but Remus sees her face relax fractionally, and breathes out in a silent whoosh of relief. “There’s sobering potion in that cupboard-” she nods to the third one over and waves her wand, but the lock doesn’t break under her instruction, though the bottles do soar out with the simple expedience of shattering the glass case. “-oh, god, I’ll clean that tomorrow.” She directs them to James and Sirius before fixing James with a beady eye. “You’ll make sure they take it?”

Remus winces. “Yes.”

“Then I’ll see you in the library.”

Lily turns on her heel and leaves. Remus lifts his brows back at James and Sirius, both of whom are eyeing the potion with distaste.

“Well, get on with it, then,” he says, forcibly cheerful. “Bottom’s up!”

...

Lily would feel more pity for the others if she hadn’t been working so damn hard herself. She  _knows_ she’s being unfair. Intellectually, that knowledge is present. What isn’t is her patience. They can rest once this war is over, and wanting to live during it- 

 _We survive,_ she thinks, tapping her nails against the book-cover impatiently.  _We survive, and only once we’ve managed that, we live._

The memory of James comparing Peter to her sister still blazes, like a hot coal set against her breast. Petunia is nasty and low and mean but she’s not evil. And Peter- what he’s done is evil. Letting Voldemort come after them, betraying them like that... it’s evil, like taking the heart out of an innocent and crushing it to dust.

When Lily closes her eyes, she can hear Harry’s terrified screams; she can smell James’ blood. She’s slept, yes, but only in short stretches, and mostly subsists on Dreamless Sleep once every four days, which is just long enough not to build up either resistance or dependence. She’s furious and exhausted and surviving in a home that she loathes with every inch of her body, and it is all Peter’s fault.

 _I hate him,_ thinks Lily, and bows her head, draws that hate into herself like poison sucking out of the wound.  _This will not hurt me; this won’t be my downfall. But there will come a time when Peter is not on guard, and then I will strike._

A lioness does not hesitate to bring a fawn. And if backed into a corner, a den of loved ones behind her, a lioness is even more dangerous.

She’d joined this war because it was the right thing to do. She’d stayed because she was a muggleborn and a mudblood and in as much danger with her head down as with her head held high, and she’s got enough pride to want her life to mean something. 

It’s never been truly personal.

Not until now.

Voldemort will regret doing that. So will Peter. By the end of this, there will be justice done for all those that she loves. 

Distantly, Lily hears something crack in the kitchens. She tilts her head to the side and listens; she can hear the beginnings of some loud argument, and all it takes is one twitch of her fingers for her wand to roll across the table and straight into her palm.

 _I swear it,_ she thinks, before getting up to return to the kitchens. 

James didn’t know how he looked. Remus hasn’t been in England in nearly a year. Sirius is the likeliest to understand her need for justice, but he’s easily distracted.

It’s fine.

Her friends are dead, and her parents are buried in muggle graves that she can’t even visit for fear of leaving wards, and her sister hates her but cares for Lily’s only son because there’s no other option.

Lily will make sure they- the Death Eaters, Voldemort, all those pureblooded lords who dare to think she’ll die easy- will pay for it. For every last ounce of it.

This isn’t her first time cleaning up messes. This won’t be her last.

She refuses to feel regret for any of it.

...

By the time she makes it down to the kitchens again, there’s a full-blown argument happening. 

It’s only Sirius shouting, though; Remus and James have both retreated to the door and are just watching him wearily. It’s almost like Hogwarts, where Sirius’ duels- both verbal and magical- with his family had become legendary by the time he graduated. It only took James and Remus and Peter until third year to stop holding Sirius back, too.

“Remus?” says Lily.

James cuts her a sharp, slightly hurt, look, but doesn’t say anything. Remus sighs.

“A house-elf,” he says. “Apparently his grandfather decided that allowing Sirius access to each of the properties means keeping the properties manageable.”

“Livable,” interjects James. 

Remus shrugs. “And managing means... a house-elf. Though it seems to find the broken glass a little objectionable.”

“So why’s Sirius the one acting like a maniac?” Lily asks helplessly.

“When doesn’t Sirius act like a maniac?”

“James,” whispers Lily, a surge of irritation taking her aback with the depth of the emotion, “will you, please, for the love of god, just  _shut up?”_

“Lily?”

She averts her face when she sees the naked surprise on Remus’ face. Lily can feel the ache in her muscles; she hasn’t moved in days, only from her room to the library to the kitchen and back to the library. Disuse hurts just as much as use.

_I hate this._

“Sirius,” she says instead, and steps into the kitchen, wand up. 

Sirius turns to face her. His long hair’s disheveled and his eyes are red. Behind him is a shriveled excuse for a house elf- bulging eyes, furious, twisted mouth, skin the color of copper scale. 

“What are you doing?” Lily asks.

“I don’t want him here,” spits Sirius. Whatever calm came from the hours he’d spent with James and Remus have vanished into thin air; his hands are trembling, and there’s a vicious gleam in his eyes that leaves Lily uneasy. “He’s a spy, a great big spy for my grandfather, and I’m sick to  _death_ of this, I am, I cannot- I cannot bear this stupid family again- once was  _enough,_ goddammit!”

“Yes,” says Remus softly, slowly making his way into the kitchen. He doesn’t look away from Sirius. “It was. It is.”

Sirius slumps right where he’s standing, like his muscles have just turned to water. The desperate relief in his face, the way something taut and strained softens, leaves an aching pit in Lily’s own stomach.

But that’s when she hears the house-elf’s mutters, which turn abruptly audible: “Mudbloods... desecrating the House... blood-traitors breaking cupboards... Kreacher doesn’t know what Master was thinking, no sir... what would Master Regulus say, Kreacher wonders, oh, yes...”

“Shut up,” snaps Sirius, and though Kreacher’s mouth continues to move, no sound comes out of it. Tiredly, he turns to Lily. “Please tell me you’re going to say that we can leave this bloody place.”

“Soon,” says Lily, lowering her wand and then herself into one of the chairs. It might even make sense to have the conversation here- she’s worn enough not to want to drag herself back to the library tonight, anyways. A glance up confirms that Remus and James are inside as well, Remus with one hand white-knuckled on Sirius’ shoulder and James flanking Sirius’ left. Fine, then. Here it is. “That ring we found? It’s a horcrux."

It’d been far more complex than that, but that’s what her research boils down to. General diagnostic charms revealed nothing but Dark magic; Dark diagnostic charms revealed, in general, nothing. But one had given faint traces of soul magic, and Lily’d jumped onto that trail with zeal. The issue had been that soul magic diagnostics had revealed the ring to have not a soul nor no soul; rather somehow, a mix of the two.

What is neither a soul nor not a soul?

The answer, in the end, being a  _part_ of a soul.

From there it’d taken little time to find what kind of magic could accomplish that. She loathes the knowledge that’s sitting in her head now, all the byproducts of her research, but the end is present. Is there. That’s what matters.

“What’s a horcrux?” asks Sirius.

“An object that houses a piece of someone’s soul.” Lily watches Remus’ grip slide down from Sirius’ shoulder to his elbow and dig in. She closes her eyes for a brief moment. “There’s no way of knowing, of course, because it’s destroyed- but I think it’s fair to say that it’s You-Know-Who’s.”

“He split his soul?” asks James, looking sick. 

“To give himself immortality.”

“Ah,” says Remus. “And do we know if there are any other such... horcruxes?”

“According to the book-” Lily shakes her head, “-no. Because only a fool would want to do it even once, and multiple times? The soul is what binds our magic to the physical plane. Take that away and the magic we wield becomes fractured. More powerful, maybe, but less controlled.”

Remus sways, before levering himself into a chair slowly, not letting up on his death-grip on Sirius’ elbow. “Mad,” he says. “That’s what he was, isn’t it?”

“Master Regulus would turn in his grave, yes he would,” mutters Kreacher from behind Sirius, just hidden from Lily’s sight by James and Remus’ chair. “Tries to destroy it... but a mud-”

“Right, that’s it,” snarls Sirius, waving his wand so wildly it looks like it might take Remus’ eye out. “Impugno!”

Lily flicks a shield up quicker than thought, so the yellow birds he conjures erupt out of existence against it.  _“Stop,”_ she says into the ensuing silence, eyes narrowed on Kreacher.

“Destroy what, Kreacher?”

His eyes dip away. “The mudblood is speaking to Krea-”

“Don’t address her like that!” James says loudly, but Lily waves him away to step closer to the elf. 

“Destroy  _what,_ Kreacher?” Lily asks again.

House-elves aren’t stupid. Purebloods forget that, over and over again; they treat them like particularly faithful dogs, and don’t keep in mind that secrets said in the presence of people who won’t betray you doesn’t mean that there won’t ever come a time in which those people won’t betray you. And there’s intelligence in Kreacher’s eyes, sharp as a blade, for all that there’s hatred as well.

He’s heard what she’s said, and he’s broken through Sirius’ order to reply.

“Answer her!” says Sirius.

Kreacher says, slowly, grounding it out, “Master Regulus’ locket.”

“My brother couldn’t have made a horcrux if his life depended-”

His eyes are glowing when they meet Lily’s. They’re so large; looking closer, Lily realizes that his skin is less the color of copper scale and more that of sea foam, fathomless in its depths.  _Love,_ thinks Lily, breathless, certain as nothing else.  _This is love._ In all its terrible, cruel, enigmatic glory.Then Kreacher says, “The locket Master Regulus stole from the Dark Lord,” and Lily’s heart stops.

...

The whole ugly story spills out of Kreacher. The green glow of the cave. The bodies. The potion, like fire down his throat. The high laugh of the Dark Lord, and Regulus’ rage when he left Kreacher to die in the cave. The grief of having no body to bury, and no one to tell the story to, and solely a locket of death and soul magic to remember Regulus by.

He’s quivering by the end of it, trying to repress his urge to both tell the story and punish himself for giving up his master’s secrets.

Sirius takes the locket from him. The metal of the chain is warm in his fingers. Slowly, he lets it drop onto the wooden table and breathes, lungs aching. He cannot cry. He will not cry. All that he has left behind, all this hatred, and his brother-

Their last words had been said in an argument. It hadn’t been in Hogwarts, but that was because it was Easter and Regulus was home for the break. They’d seen each other in Diagon by accident, and Regulus had come over to speak to him, and Sirius cannot- for the life of him- remember  _why_ he’d come over or what they’d gotten into an argument about; all he knows is Regulus, young, color flaring high in his cheeks, eyes blazing like the stars he’s named for. Sirius himself, three years older and disgusted, viscerally repulsed with the tender way his brother curled over his left arm. Even back then, Sirius had known what that meant.

 _The only thing you love is yourself,_ he’d spat, and Regulus had stood there, wand aloft, mouth pulled tight.  _What would you know of love, you fucking soulless bastard? Only reason you’ll do anything is ‘cause you want to make our parents happy!_

 _Yes,_ Regulus had said.  _Because after all the grief they had with you, I think they deserve better!_

 _No. Because you’re afraid._ Sirius remembers that last sentence with shame, vast as his hatred for his family. The hitch to Regulus’ breathing, and the satisfaction that purred up Sirius’ spine in response.  _And that’s all anyone’s ever going to know about you, Reggie._ Regulus had stilled at that name, and Sirius hadn’t known to call it hurt then. He isn’t certain even now, but he hopes. Oh, how he hopes.  _Your fucking fear._

Sirius had apparated away, then. Hadn’t spoken to Regulus after. Hadn’t known he was dead until he read the Prophet, and hadn’t cared about that until now. He thinks he should have. He thinks, now that he does, that this grief is-

Unending.

...

“Sirius,” says Remus quietly.

Sirius turns, just enough to see him. His head aches. He hasn’t been sleeping well even before this, and now- he’s not managed even one moment of sleep the full night. His body rebels at staying awake, yes, but when he closes his eyes all Sirius sees is Regulus.

 _How afraid he must have been,_ he thinks, and grief curdles in him like a cramped muscle.  _My little brother._  

“I’m tired,” he says hoarsely, throat aching. 

“You should sleep.” Remus enters, and sits gingerly on the side of the bed. His hand hovers over Sirius’ knee before coming to rest right next to it. “You look like you could use it.”

“No, I’m more tired of  _this,”_ says Sirius, fingers digging into the coverlet, both angry and exhausted at once. “Of this stupid home. This- this way they act, always, like it doesn’t matter if we survive if the family continues. As if the family isn’t made of people.”

 _And instead of fixing things, they just want us back. They don’t know how to treat people like they’re_ people, _but they know that they’re doing something wrong. And it’s us who pay the price. Merlin, I hate them. I hate them all._

He doesn’t dare look at Remus. Only tilts his head back, flat on the pillow, so all he can see is the red-charmed ceiling. “He wanted me to stay,” Sirius says soundlessly.

Remus inhales sharply. 

It should be meaningless, and it would be to anyone else- including James, Sirius thinks- but Remus has always known what Sirius means, almost before Sirius knows it himself. 

“It wasn’t my fucking responsibility,” says Sirius, and where he might have shouted it at any other moment, right now he feels like a thread so thin it’s transparent; it exists, yes, but might well not in a heartbeat. 

“Padfoot,” says Remus, voice thick. “It wasn’t. Of course it wasn’t. Isn’t. Whatever. You staying with your family might not have changed anything.”

Something cracks in Sirius’ chest, hot, bleeding. Ruinous.

“Might,” he says faintly.

Remus’ hand closes on his ankle. His bones grate together and Sirius gasps from the sudden, sharp pain.

“Don’t act like an idiot,” says Remus loudly. “You know what I mean. But this isn’t your  _fault,_ Sirius. No, look at me.” His other hand reaches and grips Sirius’ chin and forces him to look at Remus’ eyes, blue as- as- as flowers, and gems, and the sky, and still, none of that is as alive as Remus himself. The miserable stone in his belly lightens, just a little. “Who knows what might’ve happened in a different world? If you’d been in Slytherin, or Regulus’d been in Gryffindor, or- or- I don’t know. But that didn’t happen. You didn’t stay. They’d have killed you, or as good as, and I won’t  _fucking_ let you feel bad for surviving that. Surviving them.”

“Oh, Merlin,” says Sirius, horrified at himself, at the hot tears rising in his eyes. 

He can’t even move, can only stare at Remus, who’s not letting him up, not even a little bit. Who’s only staring at him so fiercely that it makes the crack in his chest deepen, looking as patiently immovable as any mountain.

“Regulus died a hero,” Remus tells him. “That’s what matters. That’s what you should remember him as: the man who faced Vold- You-Know-Who himself, and decided he wanted no part of it. Who decided to do something, instead of just running.”

“Remus- fucking- let  _go-”_

“No,” says Remus. “Fuck you, I’ll stay like this if I want to.”

Laughter punches through the sobs caught in his chest, like a knife through paper. Sirius hears the horrible sound erupt from his chest and inhales, gasping, razor-edged. Remus immediately lets go of his chin; but just when Sirius starts to curl in on himself, he feels arms come up, swallow him whole in an embrace that shouldn’t be possible when Remus is two inches shorter and nowhere near as broad.

“I hate this,” Sirius whispers, weary, what feels like hours later.

“I know,” says Remus, and he is warm and soft and stroking one hand down Sirius’ scalp. “I know, Padfoot.”

He sleeps, then, and though the world is made of cold, cruel things, Sirius feels none of it that night. Not as he is, safe in Remus’ arms.

...

Lily closes her eyes for just a moment before summoning her courage. The rap of her knuckles on the door shouldn’t feel as momentous as it does. But still she hesitates, even after she hears the muffled  _“Come in!”_ from within.

Then, breathing deep, she enters.

It’s James, sitting at the desk in the corner of the room. He’s leaning back so there’s only two feet on the floor, wand spinning in his hand and spitting up sparks. 

“We should talk,” she says.

James wand still in his hands. His chair thuds onto the ground. Then he nods.

Lily clambers onto the bed and folds her legs under her. “Why?” she asks, sharper than she’d meant but still aching.

“Because he’s Peter,” says James quietly. The sparks from his wand light up the bottom of his face- the chin, the juts of his cheekbones. “I’ve known him since he was eleven, Lily. I can’t just- forget that.”

“He tried to  _kill_ us,” says Lily. “If you’ve forgotten.”

“Only reason you can think of for me not being a vengeful bastard?”

“He held Harry and swore to protect us and then he gave us up.” Lily runs a hand through her hair, tries to still the tremors. “I don’t know how you can just forget that he gave us up!”

“I didn’t. I can’t forget that. But he loved Harry, Lils. He loved you, and me, and not all of it was a lie.” James looks so earnest. Eyes shining. Face glowing. “I believe that. It’s  _Peter,_ for Merlin’s sake! That’s what you, all of you, keep forgetting! He’s pants at lying and shit at acting and if we live in a world where Peter fooled us into believing he loved us for  _years_ without us doubting him for a minute- then I don’t know if I can believe anything at all, Lily. Not anything.”

Lily folds her fingers together. She hasn’t forgotten. Hadn’t forgotten. That’s true enough. But Lily thinks that she’d chosen not to dwell on it; because she hadn’t been able to, not in those first horrible days when she hadn’t known if James would survive and all she’d had was Harry and a wand and fear like a steady wolf at her heels.

She thinks: Peter, in Hogwarts, hair a flaxen gold and a laugh softer but far, far more often than all of theirs. He hadn’t liked her much in the beginning, because Lily hadn’t been very nice to James that seventh year before they started going out. But they’d been the only Gryffindors in NEWT Charms and in between tutoring and desperate cramming, both of them had become something like friends. Then had come their training in charm-work, in Brussels for Lily and Antwerp for Peter. And after- the war, the silence, the warmth of his hand over hers as they both waited in the kitchen for James and Sirius to come home.

“Then why’d he do this, Jimmy?” Lily lifts her eyes to James, and doesn’t look away. She can be courageous. Now, with a world balanced on her shoulders and the flames of her rage faded to ash, she can be courageous. “How, if he did not hate us?”

“I think,” says James quietly. “I- I think he was afraid. Always. And Pete was the quietest of us, and we started thinking that if he didn’t say anything that meant he was fine with it.” He stands and makes his way closer to Lily, though he doesn’t touch her. The window behind him limns his body, throws his features into shadow but makes his outline shine. “I miss him, Lils. And I’m furious at what he’s done. Of course I am. But- he’s  _Peter.”_

Oh, but James has never moved past people as Lily has done; he has never had his heart broken like she has. He moves through life as if certain that he won’t be killed by it. 

“What if he’s killed people?”

“I have too,” says James, a little wryly. “But. No. He hasn’t. When I saw him- it’s not the look of a man who’s planned it. He hasn’t.”

Lily reaches up and grips his wrist. She can feel his heart there, in those slender muscles and delicate bones. “If it comes down to you and him, if it’s down to you two-”

“I don’t know,” says James. 

Lily cannot look away. She is caught, is speared, by the old, resigned light in James’ eyes. 

 _Not as if he won’t be killed,_ thinks Lily, heart rending in her chest.  _No. As if he would rather die, than survive in a world like that, where friendship means less than the metal in a knut. Where loyalty is nothing but a name for fools, and honor is empty as the armor of knights centuries slain._

_If we wish to make this world brighter, we must do it ourselves._

“Jimmy.”

“I don’t know. It depends. But- if it’s just me, Lily, if it’s down to just me and just him, I don’t know if I can kill him.” He leans down, and presses his lips to the very tips of her fingers. “I do not know, and that is the entire truth.”

“I believe you.” Lily twists and grabs James, hauls him closer to her, embraces him so tightly that she cannot breathe. “I  _believe_ you, and I hate this, and if you aren’t next to me when this war is over, I’ll kill you myself, you stupid, stupid,  _stupid_ man.”

“Ah, Lils,” he says, “I think you’ll have to queue up for the privilege. Merlin knows I’ve pissed enough Death Eaters off to have ‘em ahead of you.”

She burrows closer to him, until James finally gives in and topples onto the bed, half on her, half on the mattress. “I hate you,” she mumbles into his shirt. Then, before he can answer: “If you let a Death Eater kill you, I’ll make sure to have a child just so I can name it Elvendork and imagine your anger from beyond the grave.”

“Now  _that,”_ says James, voice like a rich song rising around them, “is definitely a reason to stay alive.”


End file.
